I just read Matt Bai's New York times article,
Kerry's Undeclared War. It is definitely well worth the read. It is a long interview with John Kerry about his approach to terrorism. It talks about his BCCI work and puts it into context. But there is much more.
Here it is:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/101104J.shtml
(more below)
This paragraph jumped out at me:
Kerry's view, on the other hand, suggests that it is the very premise of civilized states, rather than any one ideology, that is under attack. And no one state, acting alone, can possibly have much impact on the threat, because terrorists will always be able to move around, shelter their money and connect in cyberspace; there are no capitals for a superpower like the United States to bomb, no ambassadors to recall, no economies to sanction. The U.S. military searches for bin Laden, the Russians hunt for the Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev and the Israelis fire missiles at Hamas bomb makers; in Kerry's world, these disparate terrorist elements make up a loosely affiliated network of diabolical villains, more connected to one another by tactics and ideology than they are to any one state sponsor. The conflict, in Kerry's formulation, pits the forces of order versus the forces of chaos, and only a unified community of nations can ensure that order prevails.
As a biologist, I naturally see the world as a living body of which we are cells. I was immediately struck by the different approaches to a metastasizing cancer (terrorists) of Bush and Kerry. Bush cuts willy nilly into the tumor (splat!) allowing tumor cells to move in all directions, removing part of the tumor, but leaving the rest. He turns to remove a kidney, because he thinks the cancer might go there. He then eyes the pancreas and the gall bladder, knife in hand -- the cancer might go there, too! Meanwhile, the cancer is spreading elsewhere, and the body is weakening.
Kerry's approach is much more akin to the most advanced multifaceted thinking on cancer, where one starves its blood supply, alters its genetics, stimulates the body's immune system against it, and triggers apoptosis (cell suicide) to eliminate cancer in addition to focused beams of radiation and targeted poison.
Clearly, if you're a Fundamentalist Muslim who can't wait to go to Paradise or a Fundamentalist Christian who can't wait to be beamed up to Spaceship Jesus while the Earth burns, you may not regard survival as necessarily important or desirable. But the vast majority of healthy normal folks would very much like to live, as we appreciate the gift of life.