Dr. Samuel Johnson once observed that "nothing so concentrates the mind as the prospect of being hanged in the morning." He might have added that, once the immediate danger is past, nothing is so quickly put out of mind; we simply don't want to relive the horror.  The problem with this is that if we don't want to be hanged, we'd better figure out how we came to be in danger the first time, and make sure that can never happen again.
     This doesn't  mean we simply have to search everyone boarding an airliner and confiscate their nail clippers and fingernail polish.  In war, it is never enough to simply study what your enemy did last week, or last year, and slavishly devote all your energy and resources to preventing a recurrence of that same attack. 
     Rather,  we must recognize that we are, in fact, at war, and adjust our mindset to the requirements of war.  Fundamentally this means we must recognize that people are trying to kill us, and we must outsmart and outfight them and kill them first.  After we kill enough of them, our enemies will give up trying to kill us, the war will be over, and all the killing will stop.  Then our enemies will go back to simply demanding that we give them billions of American Dollars every year as foreign aid welfare, and demanding that we keep out of their way while they kill the Jews.
     For a start, this means we must abjure the mindset of the Democrat politicians, Leftists all, who assure us that "there is no war--it's just a bumper sticker."; or, equally deadly, the assertion that "This war is lost!"  (both attributable to Sen. Harry Reid, but not limited to him by any means).   This very day, the headlines reveal that jihadi fanatics were arrested after attempting to set off two gigantic bombs which were intended to destroy an office building in Springfield Illinois, and a skyscraper in Dallas Texas.  Only good work by our security services prevented these buildings from becoming deathtraps for thousands of Americans;  some 'bumper sticker."
     We must get over the expectation that this war will be fought and done with in a few years, like WWI or WWII.  We are not fighting a single government, or even an alliance of two or three nations, but a politico/religious movement which is spread throughout dozens of nations, including our own.  This movement, however, is bankrolled by governments in a few countries where the jihadi fanatics either control the government, or a large faction within it.  This 'axis of jihad' is Saudi Arabia, Libya, Sudan, Iran---and nuclear armed Pakistan.  When these nations have undergone 'regime change' and are stopped from paying for bombs, bullets and katyusha rockets, the terrorist war against the USA will largely cease;  other victims, mostly Moslem, will still have a war to fight in their own countries, but that's a problem that will go on for generations.
     We must, however, think as well as fight the battles in which we are  already engaged in Iraq, Afghanistan, and America.  We must think first about our enemies, and consider how they may try to kill us, in order to prevent them from killing us.  We must, first, recognize that our enemies are neither ignorant nor stupid nor cowardly;  they are educated (as a people, if not every individual), smart, and brave.  The problem is that they are Evil.  When someone dedicates his life to murdering people in order to make them believe as he wants them to believe, and live as he wants them to live, as the jihadis do, that is Evil.  When he murders people in a foreign land because they live a life which his own fellow countrymen find attractive, and that infuriates his own ethnocentric xenophobia, as the jihadis do, that is Evil. 
     They are not born evil; it is a choice they have made, under the tutelage of their politicians, parents and priests.  We can try to educate them and convert them to our own tolerant and multi-cultural way of thinking, and teach them the virtues of democracy and peace---but first, we have to prevent them from killing us, and establish military occupation governments.  Above all, and most urgently, we must learn to anticipate what they are likely to do next to kill us and take the necessary steps to prevent them from succeeding.  Defense is never sufficient to win a war, but it is necessary if you want to live long enough to win. 
     It should be obvious that we, as a people, must learn to think 'outside the box' of our our past experience in other wars if we want to win this one.  This does not mean we should forget everything we have learned in past wars--our experience in Vietnam, preserved in the minds of Gen. Petraeus and some other brilliant military leaders and academics, helped shape the 'surge' strategy that has helped us to defeat Al Quaeda and our other enemies in Iraq.  But no war is ever a mere repeat of any past war, for technology is always changing, and the circumstances in which people find themselves--especially their political expectations, their notions of who is an enemy and who is their friend, change as constantly as the headlines on their favorite websites. 

     We must learn not to discount any possible scenario of attack simply because it has never happened before, and certainly not because we cannot believe--or do not want to believe--that anyone could be so fiendish, so evil, as to actually do it.  We must learn that our enemies'  cultural values are often quite different from our own, and they may be perfectly willing to do things to us which we would never--under normal circumstances--conceive of doing to them.  Like cut women's throats with boxcutters and hijack airliners full of innocent human beings to fly into skyscrapers full of more innocent people, for example.  Remember: nothing is too horrible to happen.

     Thus, we must force ourselves to use our imagination and consider every single physically possible attack the enemy can make upon us, prioritize them according to the likelihood of enemy action, and according to the seriousness of the consequences,  and take steps necessaary to defend against any such attack.  This is called preparing a contingency plan, and fleshing it out with actual preparations.

     We are witnessing the run-up to the acquisition of atomic bombs by the world's most dangerous madmen, the ruling ayatollahs of Iran. These dictators blithely assure us that there are no homosexuals in their country---and of course, perhaps they really do think there are  not, because their law brutally kills anyone convicted of the 'crime' of homosexuality by stoning them to death.  Equally brutal executions are meted out to those convicted of adultery, or even fornication.  This is not a joke: please go and see (or rent) the excellent and moving film--a semi-documentary---"The Stoning of Soraya M." and learn something of the nature of our enemies, the ayatollahs. 

     These same fanatics organize mass demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of otherwise sane Iranians to gather in front of our once and future embassy in Tehran and chant "DEATH TO AMERICA!  DEATH TO AMERICA!" etc.  This, also, is no joke: their president Ahmedinejad has delivered public speeches imploring his audiences to 'imagine a world without America!'   This is not simply a vivid metaphor, any more than Hitler's frequent invocation that "Der juden bin unser ungluch" ("The Jews are our misfortune") and his promise to create a world that would be "Juden rein" (empty of Jews) was merely a metaphor.  

     The Ayatollahs of Armageddon, who genuinely believe that creating a massive war will summon forth the "Hidden Twelfth Imam" from his 1200-year sojourn in a well in the sacred city of Qum, are emotionally capable of deciding to annihilate not just one, but dozens of American cities in a single strike some fine Sunday morning; soon, they will be physically able to do so as well.   They will not need Iranian ICBMs--only dozens of bombs concealed in dozens of shipping containers and commercial airliners, all headed for American ports of entry.  America, Get Ready.