The Connecticut Post reports that Thomas L. Friedman's, the New York Times' Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, says that the long-term threat posed Osama bin Laden to America's open society is much more profound and much more serious than the nuclear threat from the Soviet Union during the Cold War:
"The Soviets, at the end of the day, loved life more than they hated us," he said. "In bin Laden and his ilk, we are up against people who hate us more than they love life. And they, as a result, are not deterrable. They do not share with us a basic sense of the boundaries of civilization.
Now, when you have people who take the very instruments of our daily life the airplane, the tennis shoe, the automobile and turn them into suicide weapons, what they are doing is attacking the very thing that keeps an open society open, and that is trust."
Friedman made his remarks Wednesday night at Fairfield University's Quick Center.
This is why President Bush's grand strategy of bringing democracy and freedom to the Middle East is so important. Improving the lives of these people and giving them reasons to love life is the only way I heard of to "drain the swamp" that creates the terrorist evil doers.
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