So how DO we respond?

Submitted by Pat (United States), Mar 15, 2006 at 16:54

We were attacked by individuals who killed over 3,000 people. Are individual Americans not allowed to respond in like manner? We thought we were being civilized by letting our government act for us. But you apparently consider government action to also be terrorism, so what does that leave us?

It's the duty of a government to protect its citizens. The US government was unable to protect us from the 9/11 attacks, but it still had a duty to respond.
You and many others say that Saddam had no role in 9/11. That may be true, but what is also true is that 9/11 convinced many of us that Saddam could not be allowed to continue to defy UN resolutions and consort with terrorist groups.
The worst case scenario has been that an Islamist terrorist group would obtain WMD from a friendly government and use it to attack the West. The end result of such an action would be millions dead in the Middle East from the very justifiable counterstrike. It was considered improbable before 9/11.
It's a cliche, but it's true: 9/11 changed everything.

Exactly how are we supposed to react to attacks on our country by individuals?
Are we supposed to keep a stiff upper lip and just keep checking purses and backpacks? Are we denied the right of preemption? There are people out there who state openly their desire to destroy the United States. Are we supposed to wait until the next 9/11 before we take action?

We can't assassinate them and we can't arrest them because they are protected by foreign governments. Either we make war against those governments (which is NOT terrorism) or we do the next best thing, which you and many others may see as racist.
Since we're not allowed to fight them over there, we can at least keep them from coming over here. Since we can't tell a good Muslim from a bad Muslim, all we can do is ban ALL non-official Muslim travel to the US, which should have been done on September 12, 2001.

Muslims can let us know when they have called off the war against us.

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