The fog of war: how can we tell if we're winning the War on Terror?

Reason, June, 2005 by Stephen J. Lyons

Complaints of lack of money and equipment were rampant. What money was available was held up by bureaucratic snafus or oddly mis-distributed. Quoting a Public Policy Institute of California study, Brzezinski writes, "Alaska and North Dakota get twice as much terror funding per capita from Washington as New York. Wyoming, at $61 per head, gets four times more than California."

Brzezinski concludes his often riveting book with the subject of money--or more precisely, the lack of dollars to guard our shipping ports and equip our first responders. He places the cost of ridding the world of Saddam "at well over $150 billion." His point is that resources are finite and, in contrast to Miniter, that Bush is mishandling the War on Terror. What is being spent to maintain the war in Iraq comes at the expense of "shortchanging domestic security." The clear implication is that we are still too vulnerable. So how does Brzezinski explain the lack of attacks on our ports and elsewhere? To him, it's a matter of when, not if. At that point, he predicts, "the urge to sacrifice the fundamental values that make America one of the world's freest societies will prove powerful."

Of course, calculating whether the U.S. is too vulnerable is much like calculating whether the U.S. is winning its war. What constitutes definitive invulnerability? What does it mean that something bad has not yet happened? Readers of these books may not get final answers to their questions about the U.S. response to terror, but they may be able to refine their calculations a bit.

Stephen J. Lyons (sjlyons@hotmail.com) is the author of A View From the Inland Northwest (Globe Pequot Press). He regularly reviews books for the Chicago Sun-Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and USA Today.