"Along with preparation comes some situational awareness. When you arrive at your event, take a look around for exits and the routes that make the most sense for you. Are stairs an issue for your toddler and her stroller? Does your spouse have trouble with poorly lit hallways? Remember that you may not be able to take advantage of the main exit if things start to get bad. Take these things into account before disaster strikes."

Behind every security issue — national or international — are cultural, economic and social factors that need to be considered when tackling the problem. In the case of global terrorism, a better understanding and more open dialog about the religion of Islam itself is vital.

"According to the new wave of anti-Muslim accusations, America's enemy takes the form of a woman in national security who marries a man outside her faith as a decoy to her real intentions, acquires political positions and access to policy makers through her assimilation, and subverts the nation's interests while still propagating."

"Isolation from the games would have tremendous impact in a country well aware that public opinion is growing exceptionally suspicious of Arab monarchs. It may have domestic rules against women's rights, but to play in the games it should live up to universal, and IOC, standards."

"Perry surely knows some of this and would have corrected his statements if he had wanted to. And not a single candidate seems terribly willing to defend Turkey. Perry's assertions were left to linger, a broad-brush stroke of stereotypes and Islam-bashing that filled the air with inaccuracies."

Iraqis may have been free to blame the atrocities of the last 30 years on one man and his entourage, without ever fully coming to terms with the legacy of their own past. But, that has not been the case. Whether the sectarian violence is a civil war or not, no solace will be gained for a nation suffering under an entirely different form of hatred — not from one man, but from their own people.

The "war on terror" has always been a misnomer. It assumes that the terrorist threat can somehow be "eradicated" through the mechanism of war — through military action using bombs, guns and bullets. War may be the short-term answer to an immediate threat; it is not the answer to the long-term crises.

The Lebanon we see is the Lebanon we remember, the one we don't visit.

Since September 11, 2001, much has been said about the difficult balancing act between freedom and security, but few have made specific proposals for how to strike that balance. As the scandals over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the "torture memos" written by legal officials in the Bush administration show, without clear rules in place, things can very easily go very wrong.

It was President Bush himself who insisted on calling it a global war on terror. He wanted to indicate that this was not just another piddling law enforcement action, but an all-out, full-scale military response to Sept. 11 that would involve U.S. troops around the globe. But now, apparently, a decision has been made that the language of war isn't working for him anymore. So in recent days, the "global war on terror" has been shelved in favor of the "global struggle against violent extremism."