I can't say that you aren't. I only hope that people can see through the fool's gold the neocons are offering - I have the audacity to hope even if I am wrong, which I probably am in the short run. You are right that what the GOP offers answers fears in a way that what the Dems have doesn't. And in this, I think the Dems are fundamentally much more realistic about how terrorism operates. This is because I think their (the neocons, the Bush administration) strategy for fighting terrorism is stuck in a model that provides primacy to nation-states when nation-states are becoming less and less important because of technology, economic change, cultural change, etc. See books like Phillip Bobbitt's "Achilles Shield" or David Harvey's "The Condition of Postmodernity." Indeed, the very regions where terrorism flourishes are those where enlightenment, eurocentric nation-statism has failed - that was what the whole 20th century was about in some ways - and what terrorism is a reaction to. You are going to defeat it by going back to the age of imperialism and trying to impose these models again - why would the Middle East/Africa, etc. be any more amenable to Eurocentric models today than it was in, say, 1919. Indeed, reading David Fromkin's book ("The War to End All Wars") is particularly depressing in this regard, as the same crap is happening again. It is like the AEI scholars learned nothing from the past century.

Fundamentally, though, they are wrong, because they want to wish away cultural difference and an ugly colonial history and suggest that enemy we face today is just like say Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union without any of the extremely important contextual and historical elements I have mentioned.

Ben Pr