One of the first episodes of The West Wing was titled A Proportional Response. A plane is shot down ove the Middle East and the joint chiefs prepares a response for Bartlet. He asks: "What is the virtue of a proportional response?"

This is a question that Aaron Soking came back to once before in the American President where Michael Douglas asks: "one of these days someone is goign to have to tell me the virtue of a proportional response." Obviously it's not quite the same thing when America does it to anyone but it's been one of those question that comes to mind more and more durign the War on Terror.

We know how this goes worldwide and the entire history of conflict in modern warfare these days is not unlike Sean Connery's response in The Untouchables: "He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send of his to the morgue." That didn't really make a difference against the mob, the war on drugs or crime in general. So why is always the idea that somehow this is the only way to deal with military conflict?

I realizes that this may seem to be the rules we live by but it's always seemed to be an endless battle that never brings about resolution. We just accept as a way of life and the idea of peace, even a temporary one, is always buried under the idea of the way things have to be. That's not an answer; it's a cliche.

I don't have a solution, mind you. And its not like our politics offer any thing resembling an alternative. One end of our politics believes that the West is the agressor in all things and we should just let all of this play out. The other end truly seems to think we should carpet bomb every section of the Middle east with nuclear weapons. What I do know is that we have to stop thinking the proportional response is an actual answer.. It hasn't made a diffrence long term and its not even making a difference short term. Reason only works in an academic world and we don't live in one.