On the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Times' editorial board asks a question with no easy answer: Should we consider our conflict with terrorists a war or a police action?

Preventing another attack on the homeland isn't a war, it's a security challenge. It's not so much a question of "winning" this conflict, which will be with us until the Islamic extremism movement fades away, as it is deciding when it ceases to be a so-called war on terror and becomes a fight against terrorism.

Today also happens to be the 35th anniversary of the coup led by Chilean army General Augusto Pinochet, which overthrew the country's elected socialist leader, Salvador Allende. Former dissident Heraldo Muñoz, now Chile's ambassador to the United Nations, offers an even-handed appraisal of Pinochet's legacy as a free-market reformer, as well as the U.S. role in his rise to power:

The real economic miracle occurred after Pinochet, between 1990 and 2007, when his reforms were legitimized and improved through democratic debate and consensus. Successive governments also made many of those reforms more palatable with heavy social investment to help those left behind during the Pinochet era. As a result, growth rates almost doubled those of the preceding three decades, and poverty was cut by more than half.

Also in Op-Ed land, scholar Timothy Garton Ash warns of a "new world disorder" that is proving to be more of a global political phenomenon than Islamofascism -- and no less a challenge to the U.S. and other liberal democratic nations. Finally, bringing the focus back to domestic affairs, columnist Rosa Brooks writes about the economic advantages of beauty, real or surgically obtained. (Yes, she does work Sarah Palin into her column. She can't help herself.)

(For a balanced and thought-provoking debate over various Palin-related topics, check out this week's Dust-Up between Reason magazine's Katherine Mangu-Ward and blogger/author Amanda Marcotte.)

Elsewhere on the editorial page, the board calls for a public debate over the schools' role in promoting the arts and other social goods, and it urges L.A. city and county officials to step up preparations for the digital TV transition.