Almost entirely missing from the debate about how to win the "War on Terror" is a concept of what "victory" would actually look like. The traditional notion of winning a war is fairly clear: defeating an enemy on the battlefield and forcing it to accept political terms. But what does victory -- or defeat -- mean in a war on terror? Will this kind of war ever end? How long will it take? Would we see victory coming? Would we recognize it when it came?

Forum topic related to:

I agree that there is a culture of fear growing in the US. I see it in Pat Bucannan's post on this site about the end of the US as we know it due to mass immigration from Mexico. I also see it in the way we abuse antibiotics for fear of catching some alien bug. There's another post here from Phyllis Schlafly about students in public schools being forced to get a human pampiloma virus vaccination.

Zbigniew Brzezinski summed it very well in an op-ed for the Washington Post on March 25, 2007: