This is what 40 years of flower-power-hippie-love-smoke-that-doobie philosophy has left us: Afraid to defend ourselves for it will make us appear hard and uncompassionate to our enemies.
And, gee, it's all our fault for oppressing the noble savages anyway, so we deserve to die. Seem like an outrageously over-the-top statement? If you polled our glorious institutions of higher education nationally, solid majorities would opine that we do deserve it. It reminds me of the famous Oxford student vote in the mid 1930's, where the flower of British youthful intelligensia declared overwhelmingly that they would not fight in a war to defend their country. Hitler took note of that fine little exercise in academic freedom. Our enemies are watching us in the same manner today
If another shoe does drop in NY or D.C., my fervent hope is that the only casualties are the staunch Mr. Bloomberg who opined recently that even if another 9/11 were to occur because of it, he would still oppose profiling because that was a greater evil than mass murder, and the ever-correct Mr. Mineta. They, at least, really would deserve it.
And that brings to mind this great quote:
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
-- John Stewart Mill