Danny ChaiExcerpts from Jonathan Alter in Newsweek:
“Critics of the war on terrorism don’t seem to understand: someone is trying to kill them…. none but a fool would say, as the novelist Alice Walker did in The Village Voice, that ‘the only punishment that works is love.’We’ve tried turning the other cheek. After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing we held our fire and treated the attack as a law-enforcement matter. The terrorists stuck again anyway.
“America Firsters grasped this point after Pearl Harbor and the isolationists ran off to enlist. So why can’t Blame America Firsters grasp it now? Al Qaeda was planning its attack at exactly the time the United States was offering a Mideast peace deal favorable to the Palestinians. Nothing from us would have satisfied the fanatics, and nothing ever will.”