>Being this close to what happened, having it almost directly affect my life yesterday, and hearing one of our clients cry today on local TV for anyone to contact her with news of her father, the most level-headedness I believe I'll reach will be to be torn. This is how I felt yesterday, and it hasn't changed.
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>Torn between adopting your very rational attitude (which, as the peace loving person I am is my "normal" mode), and what I vented here yesterday regarding holding hosting countries entirely responsible for any act of terror and dealt with sternly.

Years when I needed this sort of venting are, luckily, past now.

This is all very reasonable and understandable. The only thing I'm objecting to is 'dealing with countries', because it'll be people like you and me who will suffer, and the actual perpetrators will most probably go unharmed, being trained for warfare, having intelligence information etc. One may argue that it's not the countries, it's their governments, and any nation has exactly the government it deserves. But then, the same logic can be applied to the terrorists' actions - they don't care how many civilians get killed because this is a retaliation for the actions of their government, ergo deserved. This 'blame the government, kill the people' logic was seen in action too often in the last decade, from all imaginable sides. Most of the war frenzy in my country was fueled by this sort of logic, and the only ones who weren't losing were the warlords and their camarilla.