Naturally though, this was the best news of all today.
Nothing happened. And I can spend my day watching football and not, as surely bin Laden would prefer, watching the 24/7 news coverage of the latest atrocity perpetrated in the name of Islam's Greater Good. A Times Square filled with literally 1,000,000 drunk infidel hedonists, in the city which seems to be a preferred target anyway, on a day of some symbolic significance, must surely have presented itself as a terribly desireable target for our enemies. That they did not strike cannot be attributed to their sudden change of heart, or a preference for lower-profile operations; they didn't hit us there because they couldn't. They're too busy hiding in caves in Afghanistan, getting shot at by the 82nd Airborne; or conducting Palestinian-style small operations in Iraq.

It's important to be realistic in assessing what they're doing to us in Iraq. A soldier losing his life in combat is tragic, and represents the very worst thing imaginable for the soldier's family. But we're killing and arresting dozens of insurgents a month over there, in a battle front far from our home shores instead of in our own backyards. That we have heavily armed and exquisitely trained young men trading casualties and captures with our enemies, even at 1:1, is clearly better than the 3000:19 casualty ratio among civilians in our first city on 9/11.

A realistic assessment of affairs must produce the conclusion that things now are neither quite as bad, nor quite as good, as they could be. I hope to God our military can extinguish armed insurgency in Iraq soon and end the slow but accumulating loss of life there. But recall that in Vietnam we were losing 500 soldiers killed every week at the peak of casualties. As tragic as our individual casualties are in the present conflict, numerically they don't compare, even if the ephemeral nature of our enemies seems superficially similar.

The sooner we as a nation earn the reputation of having stomach for a hard fight, the sooner tinpot psychos will be disabused of the notion they can produce our capitulation by inflicting a few casualties. I'm hopeful that the Howard Deans of the nation don't manufacture enough distaste for the war simply by their incessant comparisons to Vietnam to cause our nation to actually capitulate, run our soldiers home for their own safety, thereby proving to bin Laden once again the lessons we taught in Beirut and Mogadishu.