ON ALERT – AT 10:14 A.M. ET:  It's pretty clear from some of the stories crossing our desk that there is concern in Washington about renewed terror from Al Qaeda...even though some smug Obamans believe that the war on terror is over.  This is an administration that celebrates the end of wars that never ended.  From Fox:

WASHINGTON – A year after the U.S. raid that killed Usama bin Laden, Al Qaeda is hobbled and hunted, too busy surviving for the moment to carry out another Sept. 11-style attack on U.S. soil.

But the terrorist network dreams still of payback, and U.S. counterterrorist officials warn that, in time, its offshoots may deliver.

A decade of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that has cost the U.S. about $1.28 trillion and 6,300 U.S. troops lives has forced Al Qaeda's affiliates to regroup, from Yemen to Iraq. Bin Laden's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, is thought to be hiding, out of U.S. reach, in Pakistan's mountains, just as bin Laden was for so many years.

"It's wishful thinking to say Al Qaeda is on the brink of defeat," says Seth Jones, a Rand analyst and adviser to U.S. special operations forces. "They have increased global presence, the number of attacks by affiliates has risen, and in some places like Yemen, they've expanded control of territory."

It's a complicated, somewhat murky picture for Americans to grasp.

U.S. officials say bin Laden's old team is all but dismantled. But they say new branches are hitting Western targets and U.S. allies overseas, and still aspire to match their parent organization's milestone of Sept. 11, 2001.
The deadliest is the affiliate in Yemen.

COMMENT:  There is a chronic narrative at work on the American left that we tend to exaggerate enemy threats.  Part of that narrative dovetails with another part of leftist imagery that holds that we have a large defense budget only to feed the greed of the "industrial-military complex."

Now, I have no doubt that the "complex" does try to scare us, in part to market its wares.  I also have no doubt that the defense establishment sometimes gets a bit vivid.  Before World War II there was a standing joke about the Navy always detecting submarines off America's coasts...just before the Navy budget was up for approval in Congress.

That having been said, it is a terrible mistake to think that we constantly inflate foreign threats.  Indeed, this administration is minimizing them.  At the end of the Cold War, the left heckled us for our "Cold War mentality," arguing that the Soviet Union had always been weak, and had collapsed under its own weight, and that we had never needed large defense outlays.

Well, excuse me, but the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear-tipped missiles pointed at the U.S., a massive land army on the periphery of Europe, and a regular supply system that equipped rogue nations hostile to the West.  It collapsed in part because of the economic pressure applied by Ronald Reagan's defense buildup.  And the Soviet Union fought World War II with, essentially, a third-world economy, and yet made mincemeat of the Nazi divisions.  More than 80% of the Nazi casualties were suffered at the hands of the Red Army, that peasant army representing a nation that couldn't feed many of its own children. 

Judge foreign enemies by their effectiveness and resourcefulness, not by the size of their economies.  The war on terror is far from over.

April 29,  2012