A Merely Technical Exercise

This is the NYTimes' response to the thwarting of the terrorist plot in the U.K.:

"Here is what we want to do in the wake of the arrests in Britain. We want to understand as much as possible about what terrorists were planning. To talk about airport security and how to make it better. To find out what worked in the British investigation and discuss how to push these efforts farther. It would be a blessed moment in modern American history if we could do that without turning this into a political game plan."

Of course, no sane person could be against the Times' sentiment, but this is the Times concentrating on small things and avoiding the elephant in the room, which is the question of how to win this war. The Times just wants somehow to manage terrorism, not defeat it. It wants to drain all the moral and political content out of the war and reduce it to a technical/bureaucratic exercise.