Whether you believe last week’s alleged terrorist plot was a serious threat or not, everything we know about the incident suggests law-enforcement efforts were key to disrupting the threat.
It’s odd, therefore, for the Bush White House to continue to insist otherwise.
Consider, for example, what the president told a friendly audience in Pennsylvania yesterday.
“I understand the nature of this enemy. This is an enemy that has an ideology. Some people say, well, this may be a law enforcement matter. No, these are people that are politically driven. They’ve got motives. They do not believe in freedom. They don’t believe in freedom of religion; they don’t believe in freedom of dissent; they don’t believe in women’s rights. They have a backward view of the world.” (emphasis added)
Even by Bush standards, this is an awkward non-sequitur. To hear the president tell it, the terrorists’ anti-freedom agenda is “politically driven,” which means it can’t be a law-enforcement issue. Can anyone tell me what in the world this means?
The same thing happened last week, when a senior administration official told The Weekly Standard, “The idea that the jihadists would all be peaceful, warm, lovable, God-fearing people if it weren’t for U.S. policies strikes me as not a valid idea. [Democrats] do not have the understanding or the commitment to take on these forces. It’s like John Kerry. The law enforcement approach doesn’t work.”
Except that approach clearly does work. The Bush gang is struggling to connect two points that clearly don’t go together in any kind of coherent way: the bad guys are dangerous, so law-enforcement can’t help. As George Will put it, “It is the language of foreign policy — and domestic politics — unrealism.”
Whether the Bush White House likes it or not, nearly every success we’ve see in the war on terror has been “racked up by cops, not by soldiers.” Last week reinforced this. The fact that the president is more convinced than ever of the opposite suggests further detachment from reality.