If Bush is so good on terror, why are we so scared?

[Beet]

Here is a good article from Steve Flynn at the Council on Foreign Relations, a pretty conservative, pro-business think tank.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040726-664992,00.html

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. has spent more than $500 million to make America's seaports more secure. Sound like a lot? It isn't.

That's about what the U.S. spends in Iraq in four days, notes Stephen Flynn, whose new book on homeland security, America the Vulnerable, concludes that the U.S. is scandalously unprepared for the next terrorist attack. Why? Because it still doesn't see protecting the homeland as a priority. Flynn, a retired U.S. Coast Guard commander and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, says our leaders harbor the delusion that the real fight against terrorism is overseas. In the meantime, the U.S. has made scant progress in protecting its own infrastructure.

Having spent years visiting America's high-risk targets, Flynn offers a damning assessment and some solutions as well.

If Sept. 11, 2001, was a wake-up call, clearly America has fallen back asleep. With the exception of airports, much of what is critical to our way of life remains unprotected: water and food supplies; refineries, energy grids and pipelines; bridges, tunnels, trains, trucks and cargo containers; as well as the cyberbackbone that underpins the information age in which we live. The security measures we have been cobbling together are hardly fit to deter amateur thieves, vandals and hackers, never mind determined terrorists. Worse still, small improvements are often oversold as giant steps forward, lowering the guard of average citizens as they carry on their daily routine with an unwarranted sense of confidence. For instance, while the flying public is busy shedding shoes and bags at X-ray check-in points, the tons of air freight being loaded into the belly of most commercial airliners continues to fly the American skies virtually uninspected...

[Beet]

Does anyone have any idea how much time and investment (both monetary and human) it would take to gaurd every single port, railroad, bridge and building in America?  The United States would be bankrupt, literally, we could not raise the amount of money needed.  This is not to mention economic collapse do to the strain on the workforce.

This is why Bush, in his wisdom, has decided that the War of Terror is a real war, not a police action.  It is literally impossible to stop all terrorist threats at home, that is why we need to go abroand and take the conflict to them, so they can't get over here.  The narrow-mindedness involved in supporting the Kerry possition is astounding.

There is only one problem with this reasoning (other than its wild and wilfully fatalistic exaggeration): Flynn's already thought of it! Yet he still chose to write this book. Why? To make the case that an a serious attempt at homeland defense after 9/11 is worthwhile.

First, one must accept the deep and serious consequences possible from a major terror attack, including thousands of deaths or economic collapse. Second, Flynn points out how easy such an attack would be. Al Qaeda realises now that 9/11 was a tactical victory and a strategic mistake. Its organization is now seriously weakened and it failed to launch a knockout blow against the United States. If it was going to make the same mistake again, it already would have. Third, Flynn points out that the $500 million total we are spending on domestic security is only what we are spending in four days in Iraq. A quick, genuine handover of power in Iraq, or a diversion of funds away from the President's Mars program, would easily allow up to double or triple what we are currently spending. But fourth, Flynn proposes a solution: a Federal Homeland Security System integrating private and public expertise, funded by levying fees on such activities as the movement of containers and by requiring owners and operators of critical infrastructure to carry antiterrorist insurance. The details of Flynn's proposals are significant in representing a genuinely long-term response to a threat he is convinced will remain serious for an indefinite longterm. Any risks they might pose to civil liberties, he argues, are marginal compared with the likely domestic consequences of being caught unprepared a second time.

This is certainly an interesting book by a guy who knows what he is talking about.