The smoke has now cleared

What do we do, can we do, about Brussels?

THE SIRENS have stopped. The screams have become soft sobs as families bury their dead and governments lower flags. Again. A few days removed from the explosions in Brussels, a question keeps coming up: What now?

Here’s a good place to start, but only start: Track down the murderers who are still alive, and give them the justice they deserve. Merciless justice.

Days after the terror attacks in Brussels, CNN was reporting that those in the know are aware of multiple ISIS plots in Europe. As of now. As in, tomorrow’s headlines could be a whole lot like Wednesday’s. Also, according to the network:

“A combination of electronic intercepts, human sources and database tracking indicates several possible targets had been picked out by the ISIS operatives over the last few months since the Paris attacks, according to U.S. counterterrorism officials.”

Some officials think there could be dozens of ISIS operatives on the run in Europe as you read this. Here’s hoping they stop running soon enough. And are unable to again.

But what about the future, the near future? What can be done to make it harder for the bad guys to pull another Brussels? Or Paris. Or San Bernardino. Or Boston. Or 9/11.

As a president named George W. Bush once said, the War on Terror will be like no other war in terms of duration. It may never end. Not as long as there are those who’d hide among civilians and schools, who don’t wear military uniforms, who blow up children on buses and hack to death men and women of the cloth, who shoot up old folks’ homes, and who think about honor about as often as the average hyena, hagfish or any other scavenger.

So history will decide whether George W. Bush or the current occupant of the Oval Office has had the best approach—which was either to go after terrorists in their safe sanctuaries and training grounds (Option 1) which this country did in Afghanistan, or to leave them alone in their sanctuary (Option 2), which happens far too often today. After Paris and Brussels, and any one of the thousands of terrorist plots come to fruition over the years, one has to think the first approach is the right one.

The question is how many more have to die before we get a new president of the United States of America come next January. And if that president learns lessons any better than the current one.