Ahh the good old days. Men were men and women were pretty and demure. Commies were the enemy. The Russians were massing troops and tanks on the borders to invade Europe while we busily built our missile defense shield to protect America the Beautiful from nuclear bombs.

The recent furor over port ownership has me thinking about who our enemies are today. Do we have any enemies or is everything about economics now? Assuming we have enemies, what do we need to protect? If no one is going to invade, are we left to protect our state secrets or intellectual property? For the past 60 years, we have spent billions of tax dollars building systems to protect ourselves from invading nations while encouraging commerce and convenience. What should we do now?

Although the nature of politics has not changed, I agree with Rumsfeld that the nature of warfare has. Part of the Administration's problems have been because they have changed some things but not others. People seem to be relying on what they know rather than what the situation calls for.

After 9-11, the President fell back on old thinking: They were very quick to simplify things by identifying an enemy and attacking them with a steadfastness zeal that would have made Joe McCarthy proud. But the War on Terror is not a war. There are no nations to fight. No armies to repel. The combatants dont even wear uniforms which legally means they arent "soldiers". It is all very confusing and our traditional WW2 mentality did not address it well. We quickly subdued Iraq's armies but that was only the beginning of our troubles.

My take-away on the port issue is that keeping us safe from terrorists has little to do with armies and the real issues arent getting much attention. It doesnt really matter who runs the port if the process itself is unsafe and easy to fool. The facts are that 95% of the 24,000 shipping containers sent into this country every single day are not checked. If a penniless immigrant family can walk into this country from Mexico, if we have been fighting the "war on drugs" for decades without stopping the flow of drugs, how hard is it for educated terrorists to smuggle something into the country? Not hard at all. B2 bombers and troops cant fix this problem any more than they helped New Orleans face Hurricane Katrina.

Part of this situation is our fault as voters. It is against our Western nature to think in terms of context or a larger system; we demand simplistic explanations and then continue to be surprised by the "unintended consequences." Moreover few citizens have any idea how food gets to their tables or what keeps the lights on; our ignorance of the systems we depend on makes it easy for our leaders to ignore the real problems and lends itself to political issues over practical ones.

When we talk about the War on Terror, we need to be thinking a lot more about our lifestyle, our values, and how much we are willing to change and pay to prevent another terrorist attack. Of course, dialog on tough issues is another thing we dont do very well.