We have reached a point that we need to define what we are fighting for and what we are fighting against.
We began the war on terrorism after 9-11 as a war against Osama Bin Laden and his followers, and against those of his ilk that he inspired. We have been fighting this war for five years now and suddenly all hell has broken loose; we have British-born Pakistanis trying to blow up passenger planes as a way to get back at us.
Who are we fighting? We stopped fighting terrorism because that is too long a term -- it takes too much space on a printed page and too much bandwidth on the Internet -- so we called it "war on terror."
Now, terror is too broad a term. We cannot identify terror so easily anymore; war itself is a form of terror, and terror is a reality of our modern life even without war going on; there are drug pushers victimizing our children and serial killers lurking everywhere.
We need to identify our enemies using a different criteria. I am not talking about our domestic enemies here -- because we have people who are burning our flags in the US as well, and then there are those who are attacking our cherished American values also. No, I am not going to talk about those in this context; I am only defining who our foreign enemies are here.
Our enemies are not members of one religion or another; our enemies are not even the extremists of any religion. Our enemies are those parties and countries who have declared themselves to be our enemies. These are our enemies. Is this too simple? Maybe it is.
Our enemies have declared war on us by declaring war on war. They are committing suicide in the midst of us -- choosing outrageous displays of desperation -- and dragging us down with them into their reality, their sense of hopelessness and impotence. They are desensitized to terror because of the misery of their lives. We must choose a different weapon against them.
We can no longer fight terror with terror. We have to identify our enemies and declare our intentions. We want peace for ourselves and our friends. If there are countries and parties who take the fight to us, we must defend ourselves; we have a right to, never mind we are a super power.