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Well, first of all, it never seems to occur to either Bai or Kerry that Kerry's model of international drug lords as the template for Al Qaeda is wrong. (We'll skip the prostitution analogy for now and try to deal with serious things.) Drug lords are businessmen trying to make money. They kill people and try to bring down Third World governments as a means of extending and protecting their business. They are driven by greed, which, in the end, can be satiated.

Islamic terrorists are driven by religion, not money. Their motives are not economic, which is exactly the problem. Poverty and misery are not the underlying cause. In fact, the major appeal of Islamic fundamentalism has been among the educated elite. (Engineering students seem to make the best recruits.) Exposure to Western culture usually makes Muslim fundamentalists more radical, which is why Samuel Huntington has called it a "Clash of Civilizations." Al Qaeda does not want to blow New York off the map because it wants to sell more heroin. It wants to destroy America because it hates it and believes Islam is destined to rule the world.

So here will come John Kerry, shuffling around Europe and the Middle East, signing treaties, accepting promises, and assuring the folks back home that everything is all right.

On top of this comes the argument that terror is really as "law enforcement problem." Liberals don't have a very good track record here, either. For more than 25 years, beginning with the U.S. Supreme Court's 1960s decisions in criminal procedure and the academically driven "deprisonization movement," liberals rooted around the country looking for the "root causes" of crime, always promising they were just ahead and that the problem was about to be solved. Meanwhile, crime soared.

Then after 1990, two things happened. First, states started reinforcing the death penalty. Second, Rudy Giuliani put into effect James Q. Wilson and Richard Hernnstein's "Broken Windows" thesis, which said that enforcing public order and policing small infractions was the way to prevent larger crimes. All of a sudden, crime began a precipitous, decade-long drop back to 1960s levels. The search for "root causes" was forgotten.

All this tells you what's about to happen if John Kerry is elected the next President. Not only does he not have the fortitude to fight the war on terror, he doesn't even believe we're in a war. Terror will be explained away as "crime" and ultimately "an aberration." Councils of world leaders will sit around mulling over the problem -- just as the U.N. now talks circles around itself while ignoring the situation in Iran and the Sudan.

Meanwhile, al Qaeda or some offshoot will continue burrowing until they accomplish their goal - another major terrorist attack on our soil. At that point, Kerry will have an explanation similar to Neville Chamberlain's: "Everything would have worked if only Hitler had kept his promises."

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