Neal Stephenson on Terror

Instapundit reports on an interview with author Neal Stephenson by Mike Godwin in Reason Magazine. Reynolds offers up this quote:

"I would point out that terrorism is a much more formidable opponent of political liberty than government. Government acts almost as a recruiting station for libertarians. Anyone who pays taxes or has to fill out government paperwork develops libertarian impulses almost as a knee-jerk reaction.
But terrorism acts as a recruiting station for statists. So it looks to me as though we are headed for a triangular system in which libertarians and statists and terrorists interact with each other in a way that I’m afraid might turn out to be quite stable."

"That, in fact, is why I see it as important to win the war. I think that the best thing for civil liberties in America is that we've gone over 3 years without another 9/11 style attack."

We know who the statists and the terrorists are. It's hard to call the U.S. a sort of ersatz-libertarian in that love triangle. In a way, none of the parties in that model COULD conduct a war on terror.