Alert Orange

We're on high terrorism alert, and apparently there is some good reason for it.

But President Bush also said Monday: "American citizens need to go about their lives but as they do so, they need to know that governments at all levels are working as hard as we possibly can to protect the American citizens."

If there is another major terrorist attack, the White House doesn't want to be accused of not being alert. But the Republican Party's main business is comforting the comfortable, and telling everyone they might be hit at any moment by a terror attack is uncomfortable. So we get mixed messages like this pre-Christmas series.

There's been some grumping about this alert. Eric Alterman in his (unarchived) Weblog for 12/22/03 said:

Now that we're on high alert for another Al-Qaida attack, aren't you glad the Bush administration has starved homeland security and pulled resources and agents out of Afghanistan in order to fight a needless, expensive, and counterproductive war in Iraq?

Joe Conason also displays a bit of the bah-humbug spirit, noting that we have this new alert while Bush Administration cheerleaders are telling us we're so much safer with Saddam in jail and about how Libya was cowered by our manly toughness. And he grumbles:

While we await our fate, I would like to hear the president explain how the bloody $200 billion invasion of Iraq improved our defenses against terrorism -- and also why, a week after Saddam's capture, the United States is confronting the worst threat from al-Qaida since the disaster of September 2001. Over the past several days, Washington's great minds have mocked Howard Dean for daring to say what the White House now more or less acknowledges: War in Iraq has made us no safer than we were last spring.