The Wall Street Journal publishes a somewhat coherent argument (by former Bush administration senior officials) as to why our legal system is seen as unable to fight Islamic terrorism and why a "War on Terror" is needed:
Judges vs. Jihadis
Spain has every right to celebrate the capture, trial and conviction of these 21 individuals either implicated in helping to organize the March 11, 2004, train bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people, or otherwise associated with terrorism. Yet there is little reason to believe that the verdicts will have any measurable deterrent effect on jihadists, who remain determined to strike at the West's civilian populations whenever opportunity allows. Prevention remains key to defeating this threat.
This is an important insight in the mindset of this crowd: they believe it is possible to prevent terrorism by exercising absolute physical control over potential terrorists - by waging armed force on them, and destroying them, or physically preventing them from entering our countries or acting there via increasingly sophisticated control and surveillance systems.
This is, of course, about control (fantaisies) rather than prevention. Prevention is actually possible, but it would require acknowledging that terrorism is a tool in the service of political goals, used to address real or perceived grievances. That would mean taking a hard look at our policies in the Islamic world, starting with our support for corrupt autocracies and the mistreatment of their populations that we have tolerated or encouraged in the name of stability (and oil investment).
The above paragraph suggests that the waronterrorists believe that Islamic terrorists are absolutists that will never be satisfied by anything beyond complete capitulation of the West, and discussion and compromise is usueless - surely a case of projection if I ever saw one...
Here, the justice system will be of limited utility because -- whether organized under the Civil Law (like Spain and most of Europe) or the Common Law (like the U.S.) -- it is not designed to anticipate and stop criminal behavior before it takes place.
(...)
Civil Law (...) [and] Common Law [criminal] system[s] are built upon the assumption that it is better to let the guilty go free than to convict the innocent.
That is an appropriate balance when a society is dealing with its own reprobates. It is not so obviously correct when the threat is a foreign movement whose purpose is to cause death and destruction on a grand scale.
In other words, let's abandon our values because our opponents do not follow them. They're damn inconvenient, when they actually constrain our behavior, aren't they? What a shallow, shortsighted argument. What are we fighting for then? Oh yeah - absolute dominance.
Only the law of armed conflict permits the flexibility needed to disrupt al Qaeda's operations on an international level. (...) Al Qaeda and its allies believe that they are at war with the West and have acted on that belief. Even with the best intentions, the West cannot prevail by ignoring this stark and unbending fact.
This is where the most fundamentally flawed argument lies - in thinking that the terrorists can actually damage the West. No, they can cause some death and destruction - but on an insignificant scale under any reasonable measure (even taking into account the extraordinary - for a terrorist attack - impact of the 9/11 attacks). Only we can break our institutions - and that's exactly what this group is setting out to do.
It's the policy of frightened, narrow-minded people - or that of control freaks bent on dictating behavior both internally or externally.
It's time someone asked them: "which is it?" Whenever Dems are attacked of being "weak on terror", the automatic retort should be "why are you so scared that our institutions are weak? - or is it that you just want to dictate your domination fantaisies on everyone?"