A suicide bomber or hijacker wants to 'get away with it' by taking out his target. But the one who sends him, briefs him, recruits him, trains him...that guy does it because he thinks he can pull it off and still get laid the next Saturday.(Amos)

Well, it may be true of course that the people behind the people who flew the planes are a totally different sort of people, who don't have the same degree of commitment, including a willingness to die. But I certainly wouldn't bet on it.

It'd be nice to believe it, because it would reduce the danger we are in. Somebody who is willing to die is the most potent weapon that there is. I suppose that is one reason why politicians and media people love to throw out the word "coward" whenever this kind of thing happens. It is reassuring.

The English media and politicians regular have done it in relation to the IRA, and it is nonsense. If they listened to the songs they'd know it was nonsense.

Whether on the scaffold high
Or the battlefield we die,
No matter if for Ireland dear we fall...

There are important differences here - I'm not saying that the IRA is identical with whatever we are up against here. One important difference is that the IRA have never come close to the scale of instant mass slaughter of civilians involved here. (To find anyone who has done that you have to turn to the nation states.) Which is not to say that the IRA have not killed enough non-combatants, God knows.

On top of that there is the almost unimaginable horror of the hijack process here - the idea of looking in the eyes of scores of innocent travelers as you fly them to their death.

That is indeed hard to imagine - but what is familiar enough is an army made up of people who are willing to die, and aware that their death, no matter how it come about, can in itself be a weapon against the enemy - that is familiar enough.

And this means that the kind of deterrent effect that Amos talked about just cannot be relied upon. The only gain from killing people in the Hindu Kush, from Bin Ladin down, is that they as individuals will not be able to play any further part in this strange conflict.

But if their deaths serve to recruit replacements who outnumber them...We could see something equivalent to a human chain reaction.

It would be great if we could believe that the people who are in control could be relied upon to keep their eye on what might actually serve to reduce danger, and to weaken the opponents, whoever they are. If instead they go in for grandstanding, and in the process do things that actually make things worse, the world is in very serious trouble.