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Sarasota News Leader OPINION November 23, 2012 His son and heir, Jalaluddin, was murdered in 1231 in what today is Turkey. Chingis Khan had wanted peace and trade with Khwarezm, not war. The shah's murder of his envoys, however, had made war inevitable. Any indecisiveness in this matter by Chingis Khan would have opened him to accusations of weakness, which he was not prepared to tolerate. At 1:40 a.m. on Saturday morning, April 5, 1986, Libyan intelligence operatives exploded a bomb in the La Belle Nightclub, a disco in West Berlin. The explosion killed two U.S. ser- vicemen and a Turkish woman. Another 229 people were wounded in the attack, including 79 Americans. Ten days later, the Reagan Administration or- dered the U.S. Air Force to bomb Tripoli and Benghazi. France refused permission for the U.S. warplanes based in England to overfly French territory on this mission. The French refusal increased the danger to our pilots and the outcome of the mission. One U.S. aircraft Page 48 was lost. Still, the overall mission was suc- cessful, and the F-111 came to be seen as a highly effective asset in America's counter-ter- rorism arsenal. Ronald Reagan had not wanted to bomb Lib- ya, but after the Gaddafi regime's cowardly attack on U.S. servicemen in West Berlin, he had no other option. Those who engage in ter- rorist acts must be taught that their actions will result in deadly punishment. Terrorists will cease their killings of innocents only when they understand and believe that they themselves will be hunted down and killed however long retribution may take. This is a lesson that they will not learn, however, as long as Washington politicians point fingers at one another and assign blame in order to achieve narrow political advantage. To be successful in defeating terrorists, we will need far more statesmen, who are in very short supply, and far fewer politicians, who are not. Apotheosis of War by Vasily Vereshchagin. Photo from the author's personal archive