I'm curious about your ideas about this one:

If someone could wave a magic wand and "win" the "war on terrorism," what would actually happen?

One of the things that jumped out at me in today's Washington Post was in an article quoting a 'source' about new reports of airline hijacking threats:

"It's the most specific I've seen since we entered this new world" after the 2001 hijackings, the source said.
from "Memo Warns of New Plots to Hijack Planes" Washington Post 073003

Does the American public, or at least the administration, really believe that we've entered some kind of 'new world,' as opposed to before? That somehow the fundamental nature of the world changed on a September morning? Is there something more than our own shaken sense of ourselves?

And as for our sense of ourselves:

Enemy Combatant Vanishes Into A 'Legal Black Hole'

It is incorrect to say they were "defending" him, because he hadn't been charged with a crime. "What we aspire to, our hope, is to be able to defend Jose Padilla," Patel said. He scoffed at the Mobbs Declaration, the sole piece of public evidence that supports the detention. Mobbs's own footnotes conceded that the government's "confidential sources" probably were not "completely candid," that one source subsequently recanted and another was being treated with drugs, and that their information may have been an attempt to mislead interrogators.

"Someone who's a confirmed liar and someone else who's on drugs and one of the two has recanted," Patel snorted. "You really think someone should be locked up for a year in solitary confinement based on that?"

"What we're asking for Mr. Padilla," he said, "is something I consider a very core American value: A guy's entitled to his day in court. That's how we do things here. We don't just throw people in jail because we think or believe they're bad."

Washington Post 073003

Much more to come