What's the Axis up to?

Today, at different times, I've learned of news pertaining to terrorism, a threat that is still here, but has gotten lost in the noise a little. Bush's recent low poll numbers can certainly be blamed in large measure on the overreaching by the religious right during the Terri Schiavo debacle and since, but with the recent quiet on the home front, I think that in some small measure, Bush has been a victim of his own success on that front, or at least of the quietness.

This quietness was noted in an article in today's Houston Chronicle.

Reports of credible terrorist threats against the United States are at their lowest level since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to U.S. intelligence officials and federal and state law enforcement authorities.

The intelligence community's daily threat assessment, developed after the terrorist attacks to keep policymakers informed, lists, on average, 25 to 50 percent fewer threats against domestic targets than it typically did during the past two years, said one senior counterterrorism official.

Many counterterrorism officials think al-Qaida and like-minded groups are focusing on Americans deployed in Iraq, where they operate with relative impunity, and on Europe.

I agree that the war in Iraq has shifted the focus of terrorists a bit, but I find what seems to be a lack of focus by the Bush administration disquieting. We've put a dent in the roach population, so to speak, but they're still busy reproducing in the walls. We have Bush holding hands with the Saudi prince and dawdling over both Iran and North Korea, for example. And then my regular readers know how concerned about China I think Bush ought to be.

(On the hand-holding posts: the first is funny, the second substantive. Chap says all that needs to be said about the hand-holding:

Handholding ain’t surprising to me since I started traveling and got all globalized–seen it in Bahrain, seen it in Korea, seen it all over, I’m man enough to deal with it without snickering. But I do wonder why the leader of our team is being all friendly with the guy who’s got such evil people on his team.

Or, in one word: Why?)

But back to the axis of evil. It seems that North Korea has fired a missile into the sea of Japan. This is not a first, the missile was short range, and the North Koreans are thought to be years away from being able to mount a nuclear warhead on a missile. But --

The Sunday test, however, occurred at an especially worrisome time as the North appeared to have resumed efforts to move forward with its nuclear weapons program. South Korean officials said last month that Pyongyang had recently shut down [link added] a nuclear reactor, possibly to harvest more weapons-grade plutonium.

And ...

North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 2003. The United States, however, is expected to seek a consensus for tough action against the North Koreans as well as the Iranians - both accused by Washington of having nuclear weapons or ambitions to build them - during the U.N. session.

Part of our way of "dealing with" North Korea has been to attempt to get its neighbors more involved via the "six-nation" talks. These have been stalled since last June -- damn close to a year! A couple more "stalls" like that and a North Korean missile launch will be something to worry about. Of course, it could be now, if intelligence is wrong. Curiously, though, while our media will happily crow about the WMD evidence being wrong in Iraq, there is zero skepticism about this particular intelligence estimate.

Speaking of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran plans to, "insist on rights to the same technology afforded to all members of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty," at an international conference that has started today. The United States will be issuing an "ultimatum" to the mullahs there -- while in fact giving them, too, more time to keep on working on their bombs. Hey, Dub: Time is not on our side.

But why would North Korea need a missile if it could just send a bomb over in a container ship? An editorial in the Houston Chronicle raises this harrowing possibility: What if our port is ground zero? And how would our government react? Well, we sadly know part of that answer, and it isn't, "Take out North Korea's nuclear facilities." No, our government will hold "six-nation talks," if we redefine "hold" to mean "allow to stall for months on end." This article advocates what I fear is more likely to happen than the military actions that should occur:

A claim of just $200 billion would bankrupt the entire insurance industry. To protect the industry's viability, Congress in 2002 passed the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, or TRIA, which commits the federal government to pay 90 percent of claims from catastrophic terrorism. But TRIA does almost nothing to stop terror in the first place [and this proposal does?], nor does it set aside funding to rebuild.

Like TRIA, the legislation we advocate would limit insurance company liability to prevent the escalating premiums insurers charge for particularly costly risks and ensure the industry's viability.

If this sounds like a bad joke, here's the punchline:

As premiums are accumulated by government and industry for use in case of nuclear terror, they would be invested in a diversified portfolio. If nuclear attacks occurred simultaneously in Houston and New York, for example, these cities, and the American economy, would badly need the influx of such funds.

I pass over, arguendo, the question of whether this setting aside of funds might resemble that of social security. I do have a question, though. If there were simultaneous attacks on New York and Houston, wouldn't the value of this portfolio drop like a rock? Would the government force an end of trading to stabilize prices? If so, who will buy these investments at what will be objectively inflated prices to finance the rebuilding? (Probably that sucker, the government would.) Yeah. Let's get the government more involved with our economy on top of it failing to do what it should to keep this ghastly scenario as remote a possibility as possible. That's a great idea. A terrorist attack followed by deficit spending and maybe runaway inflation! Pssst! The government isn't supposed to gang up on us with the terrorists!

In the vein of gallows humor, I quipped -- shortly after the September 11, 2001 atrocities -- that we would know we were doomed if our government responded to the terrorist threat, not by fighting a war, but by creating a new government agency. Well, we did both. The war has been successful so far, despite its timid and unnecessarily limited scope, but we're doing less and less of what we should be doing, and more and more of what we shouldn't.

Thousands of people were summarily executed on September 11, 2001. When our government isn't engaged in emasculating our enemies, it should be discussing how best to prevent anything remotely like that from happening again. More offense, less pork. Please.

Maybe my title should have been, "What's Uncle Sam up to?"

-- CAV

PS: Riding Sun makes note of a terrorist threat to Sweden, the Great Satan of Scandanavia.

Updates

Today: Added PS.