A question arises after the lackadaisical way the administration first dealt with this potential horror. Are we governed by serious people? A second question is raised by the ideological journey of this 23-year-old from devout Muslim to extremist to terrorist, and by his sojourn from Nigeria to London to Yemen to America.
In Omar Bradley's comment on Korea, are we fighting the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy?
Obama just ordered 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan. Yet, even if Gens. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal pull it off and pacify Kandahar, how does that protect the American homeland from suicide bombers hell-bent on blowing up airliners?
How does turning the tide in Afghanistan stop radical Muslim youth in Africa or Arabia from being trained to board planes with bombs and blow them up over the Atlantic? How do 130,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq make us more safe from an al-Qaida that has moved into Waziristan, Baluchistan, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa?
The Sept. 11 massacre may have been decided upon in Afghanistan. But the perpetrators were Saudis and Egyptians who plotted, planned and trained in Germany, Boston, Delray Beach and Northern Virginia.
How has occupying two nations at a cost of 5,000 dead, 35,000 wounded and a trillion dollars made us safer from an enemy that more resembles the Apache of Geronimo than the panzers of Rommel?
If protection of the homeland against another Sept. 11 is the goal of this war, how relevant to that goal is the building of clinics and schools in Kabul and keeping the Taliban at bay in Helmand?
Are we fighting other people's wars, rather than our own war?
We Americans are today widely hated in the Arab and Islamic world by scores of millions, out of whom al-Qaida need but recruit a few hundred suicide bombers to wreak havoc on our country.
Does having 200,000 U.S. troops in their part of the world, fighting and killing Muslims, make our country more secure than defending our borders, keeping radicals out, running al-Qaida down, and tracking and killing them where they are?
To win the war we are in, we have to fight the war we are in, not the war we prefer to fight because no one else is so good at it.