It goes without saying that the death of over 190 people in Madrid yesterday was a horrific tragedy. Some people will say this was a righteous retribution for Spain's involvement in another persons war on terrorism. An example if you will, of "eye for an eye" or "tooth for a tooth" played out in the flesh, hearts and anguish of Spanish people.

You can believe what you will, but as someone who lived in a country beset by such attacks for the best part of my youth, I can tell you that whatever the supposed justification, its just an exercise in futility. There is no lasting solution to the cause in reacting to the effect, the only solution is looking for and treating the cause. Whether it be ETA, or Al Qaeda, or some as yet unknown organization that perpetrated the crime there will be no solution from a pure seek and destroy response.

Just ask yourself, is just arresting criminals really an effective solution to crime? Is moping up pollution really the way to create a clean environment? Is treating disease after it strikes really an effective solution for ill health? No, of course not. So why is reacting to terrorism (whatever that may be) with preemptive strikes against rogue nations (whatever they may be) the proper solution to achieve national security?

Yes I agree that defense and reaction can be an intermediate response, just as no one would deny building a big gnarly fence around your property when the buglery rate is high might make you less attractive as a target. But is this really a long term solution? No of course not, you need to discover and solve the problem of why people wanted or needed to buglarize you in the first place.

I postulate that for any response to be effective there must be a perception that it will not be the permanent response based on some change in some other conditions. For instance a nuclear defense against an perceived nuclear offence must be perceived as something one is willing to eventually drop based on some unrelated criteria. Otherwise one will just end up in an escalation of "defense" against perceived "offense". Of course the two end up being the same - one mans defense is another mans offense. Just as our "pre-emptive defens"e against Iraq was clearly "preemptive offense" from their perspective, and just as the Palestinians and Israelis can never agree on who is on the offense or defense and hence "to blame" for not turning the other cheek, and just as the USA and CCCP both blamed each other for their spiraling ICBM nuclear warhead deployments. So naturally without a perception of opportunity for future improvement you'll be stuck in a rut of escalating tit-for-tat, eye for an eye, call it what you will, reactionary aggression.