Orson Scott Card is a great fiction writer. His op-eds also fall into the must-read category. His latest, posted at The Ornery American, includes this discerning analogy:

I have screens and double windows with tight-fitting sashes in my attic office. But somehow wasps occasionally find their way inside.

I don't know how they get in, but there they are, furiously dive-bombing my chair.

That's how terrorism is.

No matter who is President, there is no security system so tight that the terrorists can't get in and cause devastation and fear.

But a good President is one who doesn't forget the terrorists as soon as they've gone, or pay tribute to them in hopes of buying them off.

A good President goes out and finds the wasps' nests and kills them at the source.

It takes time to find them all, and in the process somebody's likely to get stung, and badly.

But the problem isn't solved by swatting them only after they've already crept inside and done all the damage they wanted.

President Bush's strategy is succeeding admirably. Our losses in this war are astonishingly low.

Does that mean the U.S. Marines are equivalent to this?

(Hat-tip to Dean's World)