In this series, the Iconoclast has been exploring terrorism and its potential targets, as well as short-term and long-range methods of addressing the risk. In this final part of the series, he continues to seek ways to combat terrorist exposures.

With a schoolyard bully, a kid can either give up and lose his self esteem, or he can respond and get into a fight, maybe getting his own teeth knocked out. Chances are, in today's politically correct society, it is the bullied kid who will be hauled to the principal's office, scolded, lectured, and kicked out of school for a few days, while the bully runs off to hide, crying foul. As George C. Scott says in the opening lines to Patton, every red-blooded American loves a good fight.

The modern terrorist is a schoolyard bully. He gets a big stick and decides to clobber some unsuspecting victim he does not even know, for some psychologically screwball purpose he dreams up. In the case of al Qaeda, as we noted last month, it's called Wahhabism, where there is only black-and-white, concrete thinking. Those guys cannot think in dynamic ways; they are right and everybody else is wrong and ought to be dead. That is what lay at the root of every religious war that has ever been fought.