[Urbane Guerrilla]

The same was true of the Second World War by early 1943, as far as number of casualties goes in taking the fight to the enemy, Queg. Thinking in this quota-fashion is yet another road to defeatism. That is a road I will not walk, and I urge a similar course for you: the war's opponents are just so shockingly fatuous that I find their arguments ridiculous in the extreme. How do our casualties invalidate our cause? I'm not armchairing this -- I had nine years in military service myself, and my wife is retired career military. I think I have some idea what it means to be on the sharp end. (It's risky.)

I'm not so sure I'd call them faceless, and "they" are certainly motivated towards assailing us on several bogus grounds -- like doing the right thing by Israel. At the moment, they are having considerable trouble coming up with the means to attack us on our own soil, but there was a day when they did have the means, did they not? Has there been any magic to demotivate these foes? Hell no; it's all hard work.

As I've remarked elsewhere, the strategy for defending us is that of reducing the Gap. Two of the Gap nations are Afghanistan (very likely to remain a Gap nation for a very long time owing to just about zero national consciousness, more simply put as a lack of unity and scant motivation towards it) and Iraq (some of the same problem, and perhaps some radical solution will be the only tenable one -- though I'd personally like to see a confederation evolve to keep Iraq's three major ethnicities from being Finlandized by their neighboring states).

Bringing Gap nations out of the Gap and into the world's global economic Core calls for several things to happen: democratization of the sociopolitical order, education not determined by gender, and trade, cultural, and communicative connectivity with the rest of the planet. The Gap nations get called that because there's a gap between their cultures and economies and the global economy.