Doing What's Necessary
How great it is that the loathsome Abu Musab Zarqawi is no more. The hope is that this will reduce sectarian violence in Iraq. But we must remember that the odds in counterterrorism are wildly unbalanced: The authorities have to succeed each and every time while the terrorists must get lucky just once. Which is why the war on terrorism is like no conflict America has ever faced before. It's not "scare talk" to imagine a nuclear explosion in an American city. Someone as wise and thoughtful as former Defense Secretary William Perry fears the odds are fifty-fifty. A recent documentary, Nuclear Jihad, showed how Pakistan's renegade scientist A. Q. Khan organized a nuclear Wal-Mart to sell weapons technology to anyone who could pay the price, including, quite possibly, several terrorist organizations.
The deep-rooted hate directed against the West is manifest in the wave of arrests of radical Muslims in London, Australia--and, now, Canada. For the first time, we must think about defending against infiltrators from our friendly neighbor to the north, which has only limited knowledge of recent immigrants from Muslim cities.
And how have we improved our response capability to the terrorist threat? By a 40 percent cut in funds to protect the most obvious targets, New York and Washington. This is the latest lunacy from those wonderful folks at the Department of Homeland Security. One of these days, if things improve, second thoughts may prove to be our last thoughts.
Malignancy. Commissions have met, investigations have been concluded, and reports written, but little has changed to enhance public confidence. Despite 9/11, we still tend to take comfort in our relative geographic isolation behind two vast oceans. They are porous shields, however, with millions of uninspected shipping containers arriving in our ports. On the other side of the Atlantic, thousands of radical Muslim terrorists have been training for years, largely undisturbed by European security services. These individuals are alienated, frustrated, and uncertain of their prospects in a fast-changing world. They have absorbed totalitarian ideologies steeped in twisted versions of Islam and unburdened by the constraints of tradition and culture. They use the Internet for indoctrination and communication in a way that obviates the need for leaders, with chat rooms providing the illusion that their views are universally held. The Iranian drive to build a nuclear arsenal, al Qaeda's bloody efforts to foment civil war in Iraq, and the Hamas victory in Palestine all underscore the fact that this malignancy is spreading--and rapidly.
The civilized world has a common stake in containing this internationally connected jihadist offensive. Can we match their will? As former Secretary of State George Shultz said: "If we put this in terms of World War II, we are now sometime around 1937." We paid dearly for being unconcerned about that totalitarian menace. Let's not make the same mistake twice.
Today, events in Iran are unfolding like a slow-motion Cuban missile crisis. If the mullahs develop nuclear capacities, the chance that nuclear weapons will wind up in the hands of al Qaeda, Hamas, or its client Hezbollah is greatly enhanced. Even the sleuths on CSI wouldn't be able to tell whether a bomb in a western city originated with an Iranian leak or from the loose nuclear material floating around the former Soviet Union.
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