Old Guy, because of what terrorism is, by definition, you can't win a war against it unless you kill everybody on earth. Openly acknowleging this fact does not provide terrorists one bit of assistance. To suggest otherwise probably provides terrorists with a great deal of comfort because they know that anyone who believes they can "win a war against terrorism" is an idiot. Terrorism is a tactic. Nothing more, nothing less. The US uses terror as a tactic all the time.

Some of us have said repeatedly that terrorists (those who want to see the US brought low, at any rate) love it when people like President Bush use strong-arm tactics around the world because those tactics, and Bush himself, are the best terrorist recruiting tools in the world.

What George Washington did that we can learn from, is how to be willing and able to adjust tactics on the ground to match the reality on the ground. George Bush and his people are remarkably ineffectual at this. Otherwise, they wouldn't have made the same mistake in Afghanistan that previous presidents made; the ones that resulted in the Taliban's rise to power in that country after the Soviet Union pulled out.

I'm not saying that I know for a certainty that Kerry would do better. I don't know that.