It is this pre-Sept. 11 view of terrorism institutionally still held by the CIA that John Kerry has bought into: Terrorism has always been managed. Military action will only inflame masses of Muslims. The risks of the latter are greater than the risks of the former. So keep the Pentagon and its big battalions out of the CIA's traditional covert management of terrorists.

 And in buying into it, he has also bought the CIA as a political ally during this presidential campaign. Should he win the election, presumably he would re-institute the CIA's policy.

 It was precisely President Bush's decision to declare and fight an actual, not a metaphorical, war on terrorism that so enraged the CIA and has led them to release damaging leaks against the president at key moments in the election campaign. This same view is held by much of the State Department's Foreign Service Officer corp. It is rumored that sometime in the next three weeks, they, too, will leak some damaging document or information against the president. And it is a fair guess, that Sen. Kerry will be primed to exploit that leak when it comes.

 Thus, Mr. Kerry's Sunday statement was not merely a careless lapse of verbal judgment. It represents a considered view of the world, and would be likely to define his strategy in fighting terrorism should he be elected president. So it is fair to ask whether Sen. Kerry's and the CIA's view of counter-terrorism can stand the test of the post-Sept. 11 world.

 As always in this discussion, the debate comes back to WMD -- what the CIA's Mr. Piller called the "overheated rhetoric about weapons of mass destruction" that drives policy to seek "victory" rather than "leave room for compromise ? accommodation and finesse." If that doesn't sound Kerryesque, I'll eat my chapeaux.

 It may have been reasonable in the latter part of the last century to seek compromise and accommodation with the terrorists when they were armed only with pistols and hand grenades. But what would such a policy look like today when Islamic terrorists are seeking WMD with which to "teach" America a terrible lesson?

 At the minimum such a policy would tend to drive us to withdraw from the world as instructed by bin Laden or his successors. Certainly we would abandon Israel. Probably we would abandon the Middle East oil fields to the control by the terrorist regime. Doubtlessly we would have to pay tribute (foreign aid) to beneficiaries designated by the terrorists in "compensation for our past abuses." We might well try to tamp down the export of our Hollywood, MTV culture to appease the terrorist's sensitivities. Perhaps we would have to offer special dispensations to Islamic Americans. Then, we would hope for the best.

 We would then be managing terrorism in the way we manage prostitution or gambling. It would be a policy of live and let live. Of course, prostitution and gambling are "victimless "crimes. If the terrorists didn't want to be "accommodated," "finessed" and "compromised with," there would be victims -- American victims by the hundreds of thousands.