The persistence of the terrorist danger is a result of our government’s failure to act on the evidence it already has. We know that terrorists are the agents of certain militant Islamic organizations — such as al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas — which use terrorism as a tactic to destroy the non-Islamic West. And we know that these groups function only through the assistance of certain nations, such as Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Yet Washington takes no military action against those governments, and even cravenly hails some of them as ‘allies’ in the war on terrorism. It is our government’s continuing appeasement of these enemies — not its failure to track our every movement or to monitor our every conversation — that is jeopardizing our security.

Why do our leaders continue to coddle those who create the terrorist threat, while proposing to protect us by treating all people as equal suspects in a massive game of terrorist Clue? Not because they believe that this policy will work — these same people are declaring that future terrorist assaults are inevitable — but because they dread the negative ‘world opinion’ that would follow if we named and attacked our Islamic enemies. Our leaders find it easier to debate how much to sacrifice the liberty they are charged with defending than to take the principled action necessary to secure it.

America faces a choice, not between liberty and security, but between appeasement and security. To protect America, and to preserve an America worth protecting, our government must identify — and vanquish — the real threats to both our security and our liberty.

— The Ayn Rand Institute’s Alex Epstein, from “A casualty of cowardice,” The Washington Times