Officials, and journalists, accustomed to handling civil unrest through police means, have to stretch to get their hands on national security threats, in particular what to do with military capabilities which are scaled for much greater threats than the police can handle. The military doesn't like civil affairs where a distinction has to be made between innocents and opponents, where a battle has to be fought while civil affairs continue. It blows whole areas away, hardly affected by collateral damage laments. Some military commentators have reported that th 9/11 losses are barely significant in military terms, but are a big hit for police-scale mentality, and even bigger for political mindsets which fear loss of face more than all else. Terrorism thrives by remaining less than a military-scale threat but is becoming more than police, and police-minded officials and journalists like Friedman can handle can handle. A nuke on DC or NYC could lead all of them to grow up, a favorite theme of the Times these days about Silicon Valley. The Times some months ago, by way of Jeffifer Lee, reported on the fervor with with which high-tech firms are racing to capitalize on the requirements for homeland security and the rise in military actions, redefining product lines, digging out civilian ideas for re-uniforming in national security dress. Perhaps that is what Friedman is doing, scaling up the picayune Palestinian dust-up to a global affair, as he has tried futilely to do for years but failing due to the required emphasis on its Jewish attribute for the New York City readership yet paying the price of indifference elsewhere. Friedman regularly these days predicts a series of suicide bombings in New York City, and as a sidebar elsewhere in the US. That police scale he is good at, but the military scale of widespread carnage appears beyond his comprehension -- in the spirit of the once-isolated and comfortably insulated USA. The problem with dismissing the drumbeat of terrorist alarms is that the guardians could well let a few attacks happen to show the citizenry the neeed to show respect for government. This is not to suggest that 9/11 was such an attention-getting operation but it certainly has fulfilled the dreams of those who warned about it and are now reaping its benefits -- gov, mil, com and edu.