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.<\/p>\n
It’s odd, therefore, for the Bush White House to continue to insist otherwise.<\/p>\n
Consider, for example, what the president told<\/a> a friendly audience in Pennsylvania yesterday.<\/p>\n “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.<\/b> 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)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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?<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n Except that approach clearly does<\/i> 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<\/a>, “It is the language of foreign policy — and domestic politics — unrealism.”<\/p>\n