I believe we have a real problem on our hands, militarily.

1. This is a coordinated and sophisticated logistical attack using non-military equipment.

2. In order to stage such an attack the perpetrators must have been operating from a safe haven. You can't launch this kind of coordination from an apartment in Algiers -- well you can, but this much coordination requires a government to cover up fgor you. In other words, a host nation sympathetic to your goals, or at least responsive to your bribes, sufficient to disguise your operations until they are implemented.

3. We do not know, in the ordinary terms of "nations and states" what group could be named as the target of our anger. Afghanistan? Palestine? Who, and where, is the enemy here? LEt here be no mistake that there is an "enemy", but I believe we are up against a "distributed enemy" and, as far as public knowledge extends, no idea what or where their centers of control and supply and communication are.

4. This implies to me a drawn out, distributed operation across a matrix of mixed participants and non-participants, an operation which is essentially a war but of a kind we have never fought before, even in Vietnam. It seems to me one of the inevitable consequences of these assumptions that we will see a large number of small tragedies attributable to wrong targets, misidentified foes, strikes going to wrong places. We learned a little about this in Vietnam where it was often hard to know who was friend and who was foe.

5. If this premise is correct, it means long, drawn out small-scale operations, high reliance on intelligence (which is not our strong suite), a strong need for rapid surgical deployment of force. We won't be moving battalions around. We'll be moving squads around, and possibly a large number of rapidly deployed individual agents or small teams. We have no experience thinking under these conditions and it will be riddled with stupid mistakes and learning experiences and wrongful deaths.

6. Because of the distributed nature of engagement and the fuzzy nature of the enemy we will see the worst wave of jingoism and mistrust this country has seen since Wilson's era or the anti-Nippon sentiments of the Second World War. A great deal of distrust and suspicion will be levied against the wrong peoples, such as Islamic refugees from Afghanistan and Yugoslavia who are trying desperately to build lives in peace. innocent cab drivers will be hauled out and attacked or killed if this scenario unrolls as predicted.

7. If it is the case that this attack was engendered by bin Laden or other fanatics, we face two really inestimable elements of risk. One is that this could lead to a massive world-scale conflict between Western forces and the massive population of Allah worshippers who make up a large and wide-spread portion of the world. In other words, a World War drawn not on political but on religous grounds. A second element is that we are facing (in this speculative scenario) fanatacism rooted in the belief that the sure path to Allah's garden is to die in his service. This kind of fanatacism makes military operations extremely difficult, and we have little or no experience in addressing it with other means, such as concentrated PR campaigns, psy ops and similar. Tokyo-Rose class approaches won't wash here. I tremble at the question of whether we have minds in command who are capable of addressing this kinbd of situation effectively.

Sorry for rambling on. Don't let me scare you -- remember, these are speculative efforts to analyze on insufficient data.

Stay brave, stay awake, stay rational, and be true to your heart.

A.