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Start with five propositions.

1. At some level of danger to life and property, even people strongly committed to civil liberties -- and not everyone is -- are prepared to sacrifice some privacy, freedom of movement, and convenience to greater security. And even some of the most law-abiding are prepared to ignore international laws and normal forms of international co-operation if necessary to deal with this danger.

2. Terrorism, even on a small scale, is always intended to create exaggerated feelings of insecurity, anger, and fear and is often also meant to generate irrational psychological and political demands. Very large-scale terrorism will trigger some very large-scale demands for even unproductive and costly actions.

3. This week's attacks on the World Trade Center signaled a greatly increased level of danger and are likely to trigger public demands that will occupy our politicians for some time.

4. Our elected leaders must thus find a set of actions that addresses both the reality of danger to life and property, and the reality of deep citizen fear and anger.

5. The wisest actions don't confuse dealing with the danger and dealing with the anger.

Our elected leaders, in other words, must be careful in the tradeoffs they make among the following goals: reducing the danger; respecting the demand to address citizen fear and anger; maintaining the democratic joys of freedom and privacy; reasserting for other nations our power and the power of our alliances in the world; and keeping the benefits of international co-operation and law. Maintaining such a balance would be quite a challenge even if it didn't have to be done in an atmosphere that terrorists have intentionally confused and enflamed.

President George W. Bush emphasized that we would find, catch, and punish the perpetrators and their supporters and hosts. That helps with anxiety and anger. And it emphasizes the immorality of the actions -- an important step. But, unless suicide bombers are in short supply, or are deterrable (two unlikely conditions), that prescription doesn't deal with the new level of danger and its effects on our self-confidence. Only more effective prevention, enlightened by what we learn from investigation about how this was done, can reduce the dangers and thereby maintain our national self-confidence over time.

In an ideal world, prevention of attacks on the United States might be accomplished by making sure that every state in the world takes all the necessary steps to keep any sizeable group from plotting against us.

That is an effort worth pursuing, but even a single exception, based on hostile politics or incompetence, would leave us exposed to well-organized and financed terrorist groups. Short of that utopia, greater prevention of attacks within the United States will require more spying and less free access to targets and needed resources (such as airplanes loaded with fuel). And these two types of steps will be disproportionately targeted at any group or groups that monopolize the supply of suicide bombers, even if only a very tiny fraction of the entire group is sympathetic to the bombers.

We should not demand of our leaders that there be no change in our liberties when greatly increased danger greatly increases the need for prevention. But we should demand there be no such change until it is convincingly shown that it will reduce the danger, and that whatever ethnic or political profiling becomes part of "access" checks be acknowledged, minimized, and handled with maximum respect for each of the overwhelming number of innocent individuals who will be disadvantaged.

This isn't as easy as it may sound. With such steps as internment, Britain often failed the first test of usefulness in its early fight against IRA terrorists. In handling its Arab citizens, Israel has often failed the second test of fairness, to its cost.

Whether or not they deter our enemies, retaliation and punishment will help deal with the fear and anger of our citizens and the worries of our allies. But the reassurance will be hollow if, as in our cruise-missile attacks on Sudan, we can't convince our people and our allies that we hit the right target. And military retaliation doesn't have to be unilateral, unless our allies are indifferent to our losses and anger. Nor need it involve steps that are likely to increase the danger by generating more recruits to the terrorist cause. Indeed, there are retaliatory steps that the United States might consider that would have the opposite effect: Supporting the opponents of the Taliban, for example, might cause its leaders to reconsider its tolerance of terrorist bases within its borders.

Responsibility is a lot to expect of elected leaders in times when the nation has been attacked. But that is what we must demand if we are to reduce the danger as well as the anger.

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