Thomas Barnett's article in Wired Magazine is an excellent analysis of the problems that face the United States in its "war on terror."

The lack of this willingness to play by rules is one of the things that's troubled me deeply about the current Administration's approach to fighting terrorism. Some of the steps taken -- like the timing of the invasion of Iraq, the treatment of prisoners from both Afghanistan ad Iraq, and so on -- have given the terrorists more ideological ammunition. Others, like the invasion of Afghanistan itself, and the beginnings of steps to reorganize our domestic security agencies, have been excellent moves. My biggest concern has not been the individual steps taken, but rather the underlying attitude that drives them: "If we think the problem is serious enough, we don't have to play by the rules anymore." As Barnett points out in his article, this is the Dirty Harry approach, and Americans have always had a fond place in their hearts for it. To say that it's a trap, though, is a grave understatement.

Unless we want to spend the rest of this conflict trying to rationalize police brutality and torture, the US needs to acknowledge (1) that it's not above the law; and (2) that it needs a new set of rules for capturing, processing, detaining, and prosecuting such nonstate actors as transnational terrorists. In short, we need Dirty Harry to come clean. Frontier justice must be replaced by a real justice system. And there's nothing wrong with figuring this out as we go along.

Who writes this new set of rules? The good guys. That is, the states whose interdependence defines their shared vulnerability to transnational terrorism. There is a functioning core of the global economy: the nations in North America, Europe, Russia, the rising and established pillars of Asia, and the major economies of South America. These are the connected states, and one of the things that connects them most tightly right now is a shared commitment to combating global terrorism. The new rules need to define how the core countries cooperate to suppress terrorist activity within the core using police methods.

This is the sort of willingness to engage that could bear quite a bit of fruit. Old empires ruled with raw terror and the knowledge that entire cultures would be destroyed if the status quo was upset. As a law-abiding nation, we do have to face facts: one hand is tied behind our back, because we are unwilling to nuke whole people-groups and sow the ground with salt. Instead of taking the war on terror as an excuse to go Dirty-Harry, let's circle the wagons with other nations and craft a set of rules we should all play by when attacking the problem.