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One criterion for the use of military force, of course, is precisely the likelihood that it will prove effective at an acceptable cost. But in the end, the reason for last week's U.S. air strike came not so much from a calculation of effectiveness as from a conviction that a military blow had become inevitable. Shultz has much merit to his argument that terrorists must be forced to consider a cost for their attacks; given the evidence on Gaddafi and the military strength the U.S. had against him, it became a question of put up or shut up, now or never. The blow established the credibility of the U.S. military threat. But it did not solve the question of how to integrate that threat into a global antiterrorist strategy.
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