". . . why didn't they send cops?"

Exactly so, Peace. That's what they should have done right from the start. The folks who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were not associated with any particular nation, although most of them were Saudis. They undoubtedly regard themselves as "freedom fighters" or something like that, as angry at their own government as they were at us, and it was not that their motivation was that they "hate our way of life." For an idea of what they really hated, see Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins.

If we were going to treat them as the criminals that they were (no matter how justified they may have felt, murdering innocent civilians is a crime), we should have made use of the combined resources of various nations' intelligence services and gone after them in surgical strikes—i.e., we should have sent in the cops.

Declaring a "War on Terror" is sort of like declaring a "War on Hemorrhoids."

The illegal invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. 9/11 just provided a handy excuse for the neo-cons in the Bush administration to do what they wanted to do anyway:   try to solidify the United States as the world's only superpower by gaining geopolitical control over Iraq's oil resources. The hand on the tap gets to chose who gets the oil—and, perhaps more importantly—who doesn't.

Don Firth