Al Qaeda bet it all on raising so sharply with the coordinated attacks in New York, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania, hoping we would fold and walk away from the table - the entire area of the Middle East. But they made the mistake of being stationary…

The “Insurgents” in Iraq keep trying to raise, but it now looks like they’re about to run out of chips, and last call is coming soon. Their actions speak not of sober thought and prior planning, but hasty actions and random strikes, trying desperately to scare people away from deciding their own fate, even going so far as to threaten roof-top snipers posted at polling places in Sunni areas. (As if we would let some yahoo set up shop with a rifle on a rooftop without an Apache or gunship crawling up his ass or a Marine counter-sniper showing him the real meaning of “one shot, one kill” within seconds.) They know that their cause will be lost if the people get that first taste of the democratic process.

Good for them.

But what would be the “maximum cost”? At what point would we have possibly considered pulling out (yet again, I might add)? Is there anything that the terrorists could possibly pull off that would cause us to “go postal” (i.e., demand the use of nuclear weapons on strategic targets on the other side of the globe) or even (hypothetically) negotiate/appease?

I’d be willing to trade one American soldier for one mosque levelled and desecrated all day long, and see which one is willing to give first. But each of you (just as before) has to come up with your own answers.

I realize that this is largely hypothetical, since there is very little that most nations could do to harm us, and most of the rest are totally unwilling because we always have the Nuclear Sword of Damocles capable of utterly devestating any nation on the planet within a maximum of 45 minutes.

But it’s something to think about. What’s the maximum cost we would be willing to pay for this War on Terror?