Imagery tells a story. If we use the wrong images, we come up with a wrong story.
The Bush administration has been promoting this "war on terrorism" behaving as if terrorism itself were a state which attacked America. That is an incorrect analogy. A small fanatical group attacked America. Many in the group came from Saudi Arabia. All were connected to and motivated by Osama Bin Laden who lived and worked in Afghanistan/Pakistan.
And although the government of Afghanistan (the Taliban) supported and harbored Osama and AlQueda, the US did not destroy the whole country. It concentrated on the bad guys and facilitated a regime change. Now as the Taliban is moving back in, further military attention needs to be given to the terrorist groups there.
Afghanistan was like a patient with cancer. You surgically remove the tumor and provide treatment as needed. Britain had terrorists. Does that mean the country should be attacked? No. Police procedures were applied. That was the correct treatment.
Iraq is and was a whole different story. It may have had the cells that could have mutated into terrorism, but it was not infected when the US moved in. It's biggest problem now is not terrorism, it is getting the parts of its body of state to work together. We are not fighting terrorism directly there. We are trying to keep peace in a civil war.
Brute force is not the full answer to many and varied cancers of terrorism. Sure, there's a place for the military. But like with cancer, a great deal of the situation is preventative and a great deal of the remedy involves treatments appropriate to the situation.
Also no two cancers are exactly alike. To treat the terrorism cancer in Afghanistan as you do the terrorism cancer in Malaysia is ridiculous.
Now the President is engaged in a campaign to tie all terrorism together. He is a fool. Each area of the world has its own terrorist problems and to lump them all together and deal with them by force is just plain stupid. The President needs to deal in nuances and with more sophisticated diplomacy. Not talking to the bad guys is insufficient to the task. Labelling critics as appeasers does not solve the problem. As long as he concentrates on managing the message and and incorrectly identifying the problem, we will not be safe in this complex world in which we live.