The larger problem is that terrorism has created an atmosphere in which no official wants to be the one who gives a visa to an Al Qaeda operative, while there is no professional price for barring a professor with unpopular ideas or for making a graduate student miss a semester of school.

Don't blame me! It isn't my fault! I told the front office not to let him in! That's what I said. And I said that three years ago. Yes, I did. You should talk to the front office.

The United States should grant Tariq Ramadan a visa, not because he has an inalienable right to one but in the interest of the national good. The continuing effort to keep him out is a strategic mistake, and it shows a depressingly familiar failure on the part of the Administration to grasp the nature of the conflict with Islamist radicalism.

A strategy based on prevention is likely to prolong that which is to be prevented, or at least the infrastructure of prevention. (If the CIA could have avoided the collapse of the Soviet Union, would they?)

How many years of zero domestic attacks are required before we can declare victory?

How many violent extremsists does it take to justify a "war"?

In a twist on Matthew 18:20, "For where two or three come together against my name, there am I against them."

KEEP OUT | George Packer in The New Yorker