1 So, how will we know if the new, up-to-date, military model has failed? How are we judging "success" in this activity? If another outrage doesn't invalidate it (and I agree, no matter what tactic we take, another outrage is almost a certainty), then what does? It's a serious question... in fact, it is probably the single most serious question we can be asking right now. If we really are trying to be more intelligent than just saying, "The tactics Republicans propose are good, and the ones Democrats come up with are bad," then: Give me a scenario in which you would conclude that the Bush Administrations approach to fighting terrorist threats to the US hasn't worked.

2 One gauge that occurs to me is this: how long in between terrorist attacks on U.S. targets? The sticky thing with this one is deciding whether or not to include attacks on U.S. Government/military targets within Iraq. There are two potential arguments for excluding these: 1) the possible argument that in many cases these may result from Iraqi or Arab nationalism, rather than activity of AQ or other groups, and 2) the argument that one of the intents of the Administration in pursuing its strategy in Iraq was to create a "flypaper effect," and have terrorists pursue hardened military targets rather than continuing attacks on U.S. soil against the civilian population. If the terrorist activity in Iraq is excluded, we have at this point gone longer in between attacks on U.S. targets than we did at any point in the 90s. So there's that.

3 To amplify: I see March of 2003 as a significant milestone, because it marked 18 months since the 9/11 attack. And September of that same year was, of course, the 24-month mark. We're now nearly at 36 months since the last major attack. To me, that's quite a record, considering how frequently we were hit in the 90s.

4 Setting aside Madrid and Bali (which, I assume, don't count, even though coalition partners suffered badly in them), the attacks in Saudi Arabia don't count, because...? I would assume Paul Johnson's family would beg to differ with the analysis that there have been no attacks on "US targets."