"Worse than Pearl Harbor" is not an overstatement. When all the casualties in the World Trade Center terror attack are finally tallied, it will surpass the surprise attack 60 years ago that claimed over 2,000 American lives.

Thousands dead and injured, including heroic emergency service personnel who lost their lives while trying to rescue others.

Like Pearl Harbor, there is a sense of a loss of innocence. It can't happen here, but it has. There's tremendous anger. It seems incomprehensible why so many innocent civilians were killed.

There was a Hollywood air about the attack, the already familiar image of the jetliner plowing into the South Tower and exploding in a fireball. But unlike the movies, Sylvester Stallone or Bruce Willis didn't come to our
rescue. And the Pentagon, FBI and CIA couldn't protect us either.

It's clear whatever group committed this heinous crime planned this attack for years; the sophistication and coordination in hijacking at least four airliners and attacking the Twin Towers and the Pentagon is unprecedented.

The pall of smoke hanging over New York City is mingled with fear and uncertainty. Who committed this barbaric act, everyone's asking, and what will happen now?

The calls for revenge will grow in the days ahead as the innocent victims are buried.

Osama Bin Laden is being fingered by many as the architect of this barbaric act. Speculation is running rampant: Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya and Afghanistan are also being put forth as possible suspects. Others are blaming "Arab terror" or Muslims in general.

We may never really know who's responsible for this horrifying act, but it's a given that the U.S. military will respond massively.

But before cheering our own bombs and missiles, we need to understand why this happened so we can prevent future attacks.

Many are claiming that the terrorists attacked us because we're "a beacon of freedom." Sounds nice, but silly. These monstrous acts are unjustifiable, though hardly surprising. Over much of the last century, we've bombed countries, propped up dictatorships and overthrown popularly elected
governments. We've gradually earned the enmity of much of the world.

Following the seizure of the American Embassy in Iran in 1979 by Islamic militants, there were cries to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age. Why the Iranians might be so angry was given scant attention. Few Americans know how the CIA toppled its democratically elected government in 1953 because it had nationalized its oil industry. Washington then installed the autocratic Shah, and trained and financed his regime's secret police, which tortured and killed thousands of Iranians over the years.

More recently, we've bombed Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Central America, Panama, Sudan, Serbia, Afghanistan and Colombia. We backed Iraq's invasion of Iran, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. We continue to wage war against Iraq 10 years after the Gulf War ended, resulting in over 1 million deaths. And we fund Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian lands.

Latin America is sadly familiar with our meddling, along with many countries in Africa and Asia. There's hardly a corner of the world where we haven't tried to play globo-cop.

More of the same is not the answer. We might find the perpetrators and bring them to justice, but we're likely to kill many thousands of innocent civilians in the process.

This will not enhance our security, but just spawn more terror attacks.

We can bomb any country we want -- even nuke them. We can also build a National Missile Defense, as the Pentagon wants. But how can we ever protect ourselves against people willing to turn themselves into human bombs?

Our search for security must begin elsewhere.

We'll be called on to rally around the flag and president in the coming days, and support whatever retribution is carried out. Our security would be better enhanced by using this time of grief and mourning to reconsider our position in the world and use reason -- not bombs -- to solve our problems.