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One doesn't criticize letter-writers lightly, but when a number of the alleged "facts" set out in their letter are just plain wrong, it is perhaps worthwhile to do so.

In Linda DeLaMare's letter Wednesday, such is the case, and those misleading facts deserve to be considered at some length.

DeLaMare writes bluntly at the end of her listing of the dead, "These are just the American casualties."

Dead wrong.

And if she had taken the time to actually study the events, she would have known that.

In 1988, true enough, Pan Am Flight 103 was blown out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, but not all the passengers were American, and certainly those on the ground were not. At least 41 of the dead were British citizens.

In August 1988 the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up, and more than 200 were killed. But the vast majority were African citizens, not Americans.

DeLaMare also cites the alleged assassination plot by Saddam Hussein against President George H.W. Bush.

No one was killed. No one even took action to further the plot, and even today there are questions about the validity of the charges.

It might be remembered that 290 civilians aboard an Iranian passenger jet were killed by the U.S. Navy in 1988. That was a "mistake," not a terrorist act, but one has to wonder how the relatives saw it.

One also has to understand that the 4,000-plus American dead in Iraq did not have to die. They died because the Bush administration phonied up a war that need never have been fought.

The major flaw in DeLaMare's letter, however, was the lumping together of disparate, disconnected events that have nothing to do with one another.

The bombing of the embassy in Lebanon had not a single thing to do with the World Trade Center or Lockerbie, and it's this that worries me.

Rather than focusing on Al Qaeda, for instance, we are encouraged to just toss all the "terrorists" into a pot and stir them up as if they are one and the same. They're not.

Stuff Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and Saddam's old Baathists into a room together, and they probably couldn't agree on lunch, much less an orchestrated campaign against the western world. (It ought to be noted that the attacks on the WTC are so far the only efforts made by any foreign terrorist organization to attack the U.S. on its home soil.)

And that's ignoring the groups that are simply out of the picture today. Libya has essentially stepped away from terrorist activity, with no reason to believe it will backslide.

All of which makes it difficult, if not absurd, to lump it all together in a "war on terror." Even during the Cold War, when Russia and China were at each other's throats, we knew better than to pass off Vietnam, say, as "the war against communism."

Anyway, who should we be fighting? Pakistan has done little to effectively combat Al Qaeda and others in its border areas, but it remains a sovereign state we must deal with.

But if it doesn't make the effort to fight Al Qaeda et al., what is our recommended action? Attack Pakistan itself? Let's see, better start making a list. (And they have nukes, too.)

All of which is by way of saying: So what the heck are we supposed to do?

Yes, Al Qaeda would love to get its hands on nuclear weapons or biological/chemical weapons, with results that stretch the imagination.

On the other hand, we also have to realize this: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by nuclear weapons and, in an overall sense, Japan survived rather handily, becoming one of the great economic powers of the world.

We also lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation for 50 years during the Cold War, and somehow we survived. Even bin Laden understands that, were he ever to light off a nuke, there would literally be no stopping us.

But the fact may be that dealing with terror, whether it involves a crippled man being thrown overboard or the death of hundreds in an urban high-rise, is what has been given to us, and that long-term efforts such as the Bush administration wants to pursue are by nature limited and extremely difficult.

A new book by Philip Bobbitt, "Terror and Consent: The Wars of the Twenty-First Century," offers at least some initial thought into the mess.

"He sees the terrorist threat as deadly serious," writes reviewer and author Niall Ferguson in the New York Times. "He is willing to fight it. But he wants to fight it within the law, and with our traditional allies."

In other words, don't throw out the baby with the bath water.

Some changes will be made to our way of life, but our way of life is also worth preserving. We have to retain our allegiance to the rule of law, and we can't wander off by ourselves to fight the terrorists.

DeLaMare is right about one thing: By her own accounting, this war has already been going on for decades, and it is not any closer to resolution.

In fact, it may never be resolved.