The Cost of Failure

Steve Chapman makes some plausible arguments, but recall this---the failure to anticipate 9/11 was a failure of imagination.

9/11 was the work of a handful of Islamic terrorists with brains and a few box cutters.

And looming on the horizon is a major power, sitting on huge oil reserves, poised to fill the power vacuum in the Middle East powder keg if we leave.

Iran, the terror state. Iran has practiced terror for over 25 years, it harbors, trains and equips terrorists, it seeks the destruction of Israel and the development of nuclear weapons.

It's radical Islam's unspeakable brutality and the threat of nuclear catastrophe combined. As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said, most recently in Latin America where the JFK bomb plotters originated:

Rice, in the interview, said the United States “did not understand the full extent” of terrorists “operating in different parts of the world until we began to put together an international coalition to fight terrorism.”

Terrorists “will use any opportunity and any place to try and raise funds” and to train other potential terrorists, she said, adding that “that's why the counterterrorism efforts have to be worldwide.”

She reiterated that those involved in counterterrorist work must be right “100 percent of the time; the terrorists only have to be right once. That is in some ways an unfair fight, because the terrorists get up every day trying to decide how they will attack not just the United States but countries around the world.”

And as Dr. Rice has also stated, we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

So it may comfort some to view this all as a myth. But a prudent president considers the staggering human cost of failure. While the Ft. Dix and JFK plotters were no rocket scientists, the "bumbling amateurs" in Britain described by Chapman were well-educated doctors. Next time they may have an engineer or two as with 9/11, or read their internet instructions more carefully. And the new rise of anti-Semitism, in Britain, oh and in Paris "The City of Light", the centuries old brutality we now find in the midst of even modern cities should give sophisticates pause. Because this is the end game of jihad.

UPDATE: Sen. John McCain rips the NY Times on Iraq. Comments and video at HotAir.