Today both Ralph Peters, and Victor David Hanson applaud the end of a successful year in taking our war on terror to the enemy and keeping the homeland safe. But today also brings warnings from al Qaeda, reported on debka.com, that New York City will be annihilated on February 2 with nuclear weapons. The last week we have had scares about Air France planes that might have been hijacked to crash into Las Vegas or Los Angeles, possible assaults on a British Airways plane, and planned attacks on the Vatican.

Several cities in the US and overseas are now banning commercial aviation from their central city airspace, and certain foreign airlines will now have to have armed marshals on board when they fly to the U.S.  Terrorism expert Steve Emerson stated this week that the decision by the President to raise the homeland alert status to orange took 5 minutes, and raising it to red was considered for the first time.

 
One mad cow hurt beef sales at home and abroad, and a few people might get sick in a few years from the bad meat. This becomes the biggest news story of the month. What we eat affects everybody, and we all care. It is not just a political story.

But one or two mistakes on the intelligence front in the war on terror and we are talking potential catastrophe. It is all but certain, that al Qaeda has had relationships with Arab states for years, which enabled it to secure non—conventional weapons. This is the part of the story about Libya's retreat from its own WMD program that has not been publicized. The Libyans apparently supplied al Qaeda with weapons technology and training for years. Iraq trained Islamic terror groups in chemical and biologic warfare. Who knows exactly what Syria andd Iran have allowed through to Hizbollah on Israel's northern frontier.

It is hard to imagine that this country or its friends in the civilized world will remain free of intelligence failures, or major terror attacks forever. We can not bring al Qaeda to its knees, as we might a regime. It is too diffuse.

Years of ignoring the threat have led to a precarious situation: terrorists have embedded themselves in every western society in large numbers. We do not know which Muslim men mean to do us harm. Our system of civil liberties prevents us from the kind of surveillance and questioning of potential suspects that prudence might require. Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta forbade racial profiling at airports based on his experiences in a detention camp for Japanese—Americans in World War 2.

I too applaud the successes we have had in the last year. I do believe we have a President who understands where he needs to focus his attention, and is well aware of the threats we face.  There is no ability to relax in this particular kind of war. We are dealing with an enemy with which we can not make peace.

It is us or them. 

The fight to defeat them may take decades, and the momentum must always be ours. There will be defeats along the way. Some of them may be strategically significant. If the Islamists succeed in their attempts to assassinate Pakistan's Musharraf, they could soon have a significant nuclear capability in their hands. Will we then witness nuclear war between Pakistan and India, or the transfer of nuclear weapons for use against us?

What we can be sure of, is that the other side wants to kill our people, destroy our security, and end our way of life. Our response  needs to be to ramp up our efforts to track, identify, and destroy the enemy. There will be conflicts ahead between those who think John
Ashcroft represents the real threat to America, and those who think al Qaeda does. Let us hope that the rational side wins this battle before another 9/11 or worse occurs. We can safely predict who will win this fight between the civil libertarian absolutists and the security conscious after such an event. It would be nice if they won before it happens again. 

Posted by Richard 12 31 03