John Edwards and the war on terra

"There is no War on Terror". This theme is beginning to crop up more and more of late:

In a defense policy speech he planned to deliver at the Council on Foreign Relations, Edwards called the war on terror a "bumper sticker" slogan Bush had used to justify everything from abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison to the invasion of Iraq.

While I'm not a big fan of these "war on" things, like "war on poverty" or "war on drugs" the war on terror is actually a real conflict where people are trying to kill us. To diminish it because we haven't had any recent attacks is the worst kind of political pandering imaginable.

America is likely suffering from our success in preventing attacks. Some might offer that al Qaeda has purposely not attacked us during the Iraq war because we're effectively attacking ourselves, true, but such a idea defies the intelligence showing that attacks have been prevented. While it's possible the bearded cave dwellers were not directly involved it's also true they no longer have the element of surprise, making subsequent attacks harder to pull off.

So, with nearly six years of nothing the public can't be blamed for being lulled into believing there are no real threats anymore--that Bush or others are simply fearmongering to draw the scaredy cat vote. Oddly, we don't see the same speculation about Edwards and others who appear to be engaging in the reverse.

Of course with Edwards it's probably because his advisors told him to say it.

Some political insiders are saying that polls and focus groups are telling Republican strategists that people don't want to hear about Iraq during the upcoming Decision 08 campaign season. For Democrats it certainly has to include everything, which is the reason they are trying to demonize the term GWoT and downplay things like the Fort Dix plot.

While diluting post 9/11 threats may serve some political goals for the left it might not be very healthy for the country. People such as Rosie O'Donnell and Ron Paul are evidence that at least some percentage of the public is ready to believe America was responsible for 9/11 due to our "foreign policies" (weirdly implicating Bill Clinton) while an even smaller percentage believes we attacked ourselves. Therefore, if another attack occurs leading up to the election it will surely be blamed on Bush/neocons, ie, more evidence we need to scale back our destructive policies. It's sort of like giving the terrorists a free throw.

That's not to say we should run around afraid of our shadow or let politicians use fear for nefarious purposes. There needs to be a balance of sorts. FDR once famously proclaimed, "we've nothing to fear but fear itself". That led us into World War II but it cannot be misconstrued into hiding our heads in the sand. 9/11 should have cured us of that.