Which is the Bigger Threat? War or Terrorism?

Conor Friedersdorf calls it like I see it in this article.

One of my favorite quotes (including all the links):

Give the hawks their due: terrorism is an ongoing threat to the United States. In fact, it's likely to pose a bigger threat with every year that passes, insofar as technological advances are permitting people with meager resources to obtain ever deadlier weapons. Heaven forbid they get a nuke or a killer virus. What the hawks fail to recognize, however, is that perpetual war poses a bigger threat to the citizenry of a superpower than does terrorism. Already it is helping to bankrupt us financially, undermining our civil liberties, corroding our values, triggering abusive prosecutions, empowering the executive branch in ways that are anathema to the system of checks and balances implemented by the Founders, and causing us to degrade one another.

Andrew Sullivan adds:

The problem is that we do not have the same information the executive branch does and therefore have no concrete idea of the threat level. We have to trust them, and yet they seem not to trust us, by positing a risk-free security environment as the sine qua non of what Americans are prepared to live with. I'd be content to trade off some security for regaining some of the liberty we have lost since 9/11. But I do not even know if there is a trade-off.

This is the blind leading the afraid. There must be a better way.