Can I just say that the endless war in the Middle East is destroying our country? Much like

[CajunBlazer]

42. Technically your statement is correct, but it ignores reality

It would be fine if the terrorists were simple individual criminals operating exclusively in our country. Your logic falls on its face when a entity outside of our police jurisdiction uses terrorism as a way of waging war.

I'll use an analogy to show you how illogical you statement is. Let's supposed we had a gang of criminals headquartered in New Jersey which constantly sends it's members to perform terrorists attacks in New York City. If we use your logic the only response the NYPD would have available would be to try detect and capture the individual terrorists before they performed additional terrorist attacks. They would not be able to raid the gang's headquarters and capture its leaders in New Jersey. Now how stupid would that be?

In reality, when crime crosses state lines we have federal authorities (the FBI) which are authorized to put the criminal gang and its leaders out of business where ever in the country they are. But what we if the gang performing the terrorist attacks were operating out of another country and the leaders of that country would not cooperate in their capture. Worst yet, what if the the leaders of the gang were the leaders of the other country.

The choices would then be clear: We would have to continue to endure multiple attempts of terrorism for years on end (some we might prevent, but others we might not) or we could root out the the leaders of the terrorist organization in the other country. In my mind the first option is totally unacceptable. We cannot allow our population to attacked again and again without trying to address the source of the problem. Since their is no world wide police force, the only way to exercise the second option is to use our military or form an alliance with other like minded countries to jointly use our armed forces to attack the problem at its source.

Your solution simply would not work. Nor would the American public endorse it for long.