The Republicans have,

predictably, jumped all over John Kerry for his remarks in Sunday's New York Times Magazine article about reducing terrorism to the level of nuisance, like illegal gambling and prostitution. Rudy Giuliani, eloquent as ever, said:

"[H]is comments are kind of extraordinary, particularly since he thinks we used to before September 11 live in a relatively safe world. He says we have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance.

"I’m wondering exactly when Senator Kerry thought they were just a nuisance. Maybe when they attacked the USS Cole? Or when they attacked the World Trade Center in 1993? Or when they slaughtered the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972? Or killed Leon Klinghoffer by throwing him overboard? Or the innumerable number of terrorist acts that they committed in the 70s, the 80s and the 90s, leading up to September 11?"

And while I see where Kerry is coming from, that he wants to control and constrain terrorism because it's impossible to eradicate it completely, I think he's making a dangeous assumption: that there's a rational enemy. In the cases of illegal gambling, organized crime, prostitution and the drug cartels, you can at least expect your adversaries to act from self-interest. You cannot with terrorists. The former want money or power. The latter want to kill as many people as possible, and don't mind if they die in the process. So while you can battle terrorists by choking off their funding, tightening borders, sharing intelligence, and otherwise making it very difficult for them to operate, you can't assume that those measures will succeed as well as they would with the other forms of organized crime, because the nature of the threat is fundamentally different.

That Kerry doesn't seem to understand this, or didn't think about it before speaking (which, considering the guardedness the Times article's author makes much of, is unlikely), is telling. And the fact that he seems to think there can ever be an acceptable level of terrorism is ludicrous. The goal, like Giuliani says, should be to eradicate terrorism completely, not to bring it to a level of nuisance. If, in that process, terrorism is greatly reduced such that it has very little impact on people's daily lives, that's wonderful, but not good enough.