David Neiwert reflects on the culture of terrorism:

Most of these terrorists see themselves as infinitely smarter than the "dumb cops," and infinitely capable of going uncaught. (Many believe that they are protected by God.) So when they do get away with it at the early stages, it's taken as a clear sign to rise to the next level.

And this shows how naive it is to frame the fight against terrorism solely as a fight against a particular set of thugs and miscreants. It's not just particular bombers that we're up against, it's an entire culture, isolated in its desert fastness, suspicious of outsiders, contemptuous of Western science and democratic politics, and suffused with a dangerous sense of a divine mission -- a culture that breeds these people. And it's not until we come up with a comprehensive strategy for dealing with this unsuccessful, diseased culture that we will be able to effectively cope with the radical Christian fanatics of the American southwest.