NY Times Opinion
by Thomas Friedman
http://tinyurl.com/3f8th

What you are witnessing is why Sept. 11 amounts to World War III
— the third great totalitarian challenge to open societies in
the last 100 years. As the longtime Middle East analyst Abdullah
Schleiffer once put it to me: World War II was the Nazis, using
the engine of Germany to try to impose the reign of the perfect
race, the Aryan race. The cold war was the Marxists, using the
engine of the Soviet Union to try to impose the reign of the
perfect class, the working class. And 9/11 was about

religious totalitarians, Islamists, using suicide bombing to try to impose
the reign of the perfect faith, political Islam.

O.K., you say, but how can one possibly compare the Soviet
Union, which had thousands of nukes, with Al Qaeda? Here's how:
As dangerous as the Soviet Union was, it was always deterrable
with a wall of containment and with nukes of our own. Because,
at the end of the day, the Soviets loved life more than they
hated us. Despite our differences, we agreed on certain bedrock
rules of civilization.

With the Islamist militant groups, we face people who hate us
more than they love life. When you have large numbers of people
ready to commit suicide, and ready to do it by making themselves
into human bombs, using the most normal instruments of daily
life — an airplane, a car, a garage door opener, a cellphone,
fertilizer, a tennis shoe — you create a weapon that is
undeterrable, undetectable and inexhaustible. This poses a much
more serious threat than the Soviet Red Army because these human
bombs attack the most essential element of an open society:
trust.

.So what to do? There are only three things we can do: (1)
Improve our intelligence to deter and capture terrorists before
they act. (2) Learn to live with more risk, while maintaining
our open society. (3) Most important, find ways to get the
societies where these Islamists come from to deter them first.
Only they really know their own, and only they can really
restrain their extremists.
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I would add the following:
(4) Kill them.