Pardon my skepticism, but the Terrorism alerts smelled too strongly of politics. How interesting that in the past election, whenever Bush's popularity numbers were down, there came about another "alert". It was his ace in the hole. Get people scared, talk in vague terms about the evil doers, etc., and people will be too afraid to make a change; they'll stick with the guys promoting the war because they think they'll be "safer". Plus, many people erroneously thought that Iraq was somehow involved with 9/11, and the war was a way of punishing the attackers.

Sorry, I'm one of the many who don't believe the war has made us safer. We're spending billions of dollars of our resources on the civil war over there, instead of bolstering our national security. What have we done to protect our nuclear plants, our water supplies, etc.?