Letter: Pride getting in the way of diplomacy

Monday, July 10, 2006 | 7:15 a.m.

After decades of ignoring terrorist acts against our foreign installations and ignoring border and internal security, we are attacked by Islamists using our own planes. What does this tell us?

Does it say we have been caught with our pants down and need to pay attention to our internal and external security, or does it tell us we are faced with a formidable new enemy that is going develop sophisticated weapons, invade our country and subjugate our people?

Do we beef up our intelligence services, improve our cooperation with foreign allies and rationally consider what caused the act and how to fight this new enemy, or do we embark on a quasi-religious campaign to demonize countries we think irresponsible and mount a conventional war of gigantic proportions to demonstrate our strength and ability to inflict massive damage on our enemies?

Unfortunately, in both cases, we did the latter, defining an axis of evil in Iraq, Iran and North Korea, mounting a shock and awe campaign of standoff warfare and then invading the first country in the axis of evil, Iraq. What signal does this send to the other two countries? Are they more likely to think we are just settling old scores with an old enemy or is this the first in a series of invasions of the three countries in the axis of evil?

Wouldn't some serious diplomacy, one on one, go a long way toward defusing the situation? Are we so prideful that we can't explain to them the axis of evil thing was a mistake and that we are really not interested in invading them? Or is this just the politics of fear used by this administration to rally the Rambos to the polls in the next election?

Elwood A. Anderson, Las Vegas