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Couple of points....

AQ was able to hijack four planes simultaneously, so I wouldn't put anything past them. However, a scenario like the one the author poses would be exponentially more sophisticated and difficult to pull off. That said, I think we ARE in line for more attacks, and I frankly wonder why there haven't been a lot more since 9/11.

Second, we're targets now just Because we exist. Whatever we do, the terrorists will find some reason to attack us. Back down on Iraq? Then Israel will be the issue. If not Israel, something else. It's a fight to the finish now, whether the finish is ten years, fifty, or a hundred years down the road.

By and large, we didn't falter during the Cold War, because we knew it was either Us or Them. The same applies in this new conflict.

During the Vietnam war, the media sources that Americans had was severly limited. Lets see, CBS, NBC, ABC or local tv stations and the local newspaper. That was it. Today there is the internet, talk radio and some alternative media outlets. Also, we currently dont have a failed control freak as President (Take your pick LBJ or Nixon). We have a President who deeply understands what is at stake here. Reference his use of the word 'crusades' early on. The plain fact of the matter is these terrorists want Americans as either Islamists or dead and buried. The attacks or 'Acts' are comming whether we fight them or not. Just look what giving land to Palestinian terrorists (ie - not fighting) did for Israel. We must fight this battle. Can you imagine the courage Americans were required to muster to board ships headed to Europe to liberate it from Hitler ? We did it then, because we knew that if we left him alone, Hitler would eventually be coming for us. Do you really thing that people who refer to us as the Great Satan will ever actually leave us alone ?

We have no choice but to endure, and there yet remains much strength in our people. One more hit within our borders on such a scale as 9/11 and so many arguments for complacency and appeasement will disappear, IMHO.

If the terrs prove again that they can strike with such coordinated operational sophistication, nobody will be able to argue that 9/11 was an aberration. If the terrs attack with bio agents or radiation, nobody will argue that our existence is not threatened. Without those rhetorical gimmicks, the response of the American psyche should then tilt well toward the extreme "fight" side of the "fight/flight" response, we might guess. A shift in the group zeitgeist perhaps somewhat like the citizens who, after ambivilently opposing the tax increase to build the new stadium, then get all excited when the home team executes a championship victory.

Following such atrocities, I think that we would witness a lot of different kinds of "Korematsu" type treatment of targeted groups, including but not limited to internment camps on the basis of criminal associations, electronic tracking on the basis of immigration status, and infiltration arguably on the basis of religious affiliation. All of this would be likely be considered permissible under the US Supreme Court's decision in Korematsu v. U.S. [323 U.S. 214 (1944)].

In Korematsu, the Court upheld the constitutionality of the infamous eviction order, President Roosevelt's Executive Order No. 9066, 7 Fed. Reg., 1407. In a previous case, Hirabayashi v. U.S., the Court decided that the evictions and curfews did not unconstitutionally discriminate against persons of "ethnic affiliation" with the enemy people, and wherein the Court stated bluntly that "[w]e cannot close our eyes to the fact, demonstrated by experience, that in time of war residents having ethnic affiliations with an invading enemy may be a greater source of danger than those of a different ancestry." [320 U.S. 81, 101-102 (1943)].

These cases have not since been overturned and remain good law, even now ready to be put to use when the "invading enemy" clause of the above Hirabayashi dictum appears sufficiently analogous, in my humble opinion. So, when it comes down to it, America will not be constrained by our own Constitution from protecting ourselves. Too many come here today, but they may well be entering a very difficult trap which could both eliminate them and also bring unintended sad consequences for their kin folk.

So we might endeavor to plant the seeds of mental toughness within the minds and hearts of our associates, friends and family members who remain naive to the realities of the world. Giving a preparedness pamphlet to an elderly relative, or buying a box of JHP cartridges for a friend who's still in denial, can serve to plant such seeds of mental toughness. Even challenges such as those described in the article can be overcome with but a little faith.

John, ( a good morning to you... for some reason I missed my usual 4:00 reville and am just getting started ) I can't even pretend to guess the answer to this.

On the one hand, I see so much evidence of a decadent, degenerate, corrupt popular culture- just turn on the TV, or look around your own home town...

On the other hand, I'll never forget "let's roll," or the fact that all those firemen & policemen charged up into burning buildings everyone else was charging out of...

I just can't judge, but then again, there is history- what we did to Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich.

"Interesting times..."

I've said ( low-key ) from the beginning that we are locked in a death struggle with radical Islam... we'll either get the hardness we need to win, or shortly all our women-folk will be swathed in Burkas and confined to their houses... there's no "third way..."

I have to disagree with this one in a big way. When the American Indians fought back with 'terror' attacks on men women and children, the American people marched forth and EXTERMINATED the culture.

When the Nazis and Japanese threatened America directly, those cultures were wiped off the face of the Earth.

If the terrorists of the Middle East were to pull this off, every middle eastern nation even suspected of having these guys in their midst would get letters from the US bluntly stating to police their own or face extermination. Mecca and Medina might wind up as 'object examples' of American fury before this is all over.

You know, I can't help but notice that Americans can be pushed too far; that there may be an edge at which we arrive together, beyond which we, as a people, are just freakin' mad, and when we get mad we get unified; and when we get unified, look out.

I think part of the division, bickering, anti-marching has to do with free-floating anxiety due to living with the unknown.

However, I say, just one more 9-11 and the fury of a free people just might be unleashed. Remember those first days afterwards? Division ceased. We were uniformly filled with righteous anger.

I pray such devastation won't be visited on us, but if it is I don't think it will drive the wedge deeper. On the contrary, it might be a galvanizing event that our attackers would live (or not) to regret.

Vo Nguyen Giap (also a military history teacher) defeated the United States of America without ever winning a major tactical battle.

Yeah, right, with invaluable help by Congressional Democrats. By the end of the U.S. engagement in Vietnam, the war had become largely conventional in nature and a stalemate had been reached. The South Vietnamese Army was promised sufficient material support to maintain the stalemate. But, gee, something intervened. In the wake of Watergate, Congress radically cut aid to South Vietnam. Cut off from needed support by a Democrat Congress, the South Vietnamese Army was unable to withstand encroachment by North Vietnam, which had not lost its funding source. The problems faced by the U.S. in Vietnam, though, were never of military origin. They were political. At least this part of the story above is right.