donH says - Gee - don't do anything, you might make them mad
This kind of rhetoric is also popular with pugnacious drunks in bars. We don't go to war to preserve our knightly honor, or show what men-who-don't-back-down we are. We go to war to achieve something tangible that we need for our survival. There is little to gain from demanding Ben Laden this instant, except by way of appeasing american sensibilities, we can get him later, far cheaper. It will not materially affect the terrorist solders already in place, and imagining that capturing Ben Laden and his lieutenants will magically cause terrorism to diminish due to the increased fearful respect other countries will then have for us has eaten too many lotus blossoms. Ben Laden will be replaced 10 minutes after he is arrested, and unless you are ready to draft every able-bodied american for guard duty, we are not going to be standing over Islam dictating what's in their sermons and radio shows.
I'm a pretty serious bloodthirsty war-monger, and think we should be at war continuously if we are to maintain an effective military. But I'd urge you to remember the tankman's prayer. "Please don't spend my life in battle to gain nothing."
These terrorists have made us look like total fools, in a move that could have been designed by experts to assure that we would stumble into war in Afganistan. Why do you assume we aren't going to be even bigger fools if we do?
How smart would it be to make sure world islam opinions toward america are greased by america stumbling around like an overgrown bully, inventing ever more doubtful, creative new international excuses for being an aggressor against one of the poorest and least organized countries in the world, before unleashing Anthrax on the general US population?
Does this clever plane attack on the World Trade Center bear the earmarks of fundamentalist religionists, or does it smell more like a layered, sophisticated psy-ops action? It astonishes me that more people don't feel played by this attack on Afganistan. You don't cure being had, by being had bigger.