Forget the Horses; Save Those Barns!

Powerful forces gather off America, looking to unleash terror and destruction onto unprotected civilian populations. How should we respond?

One way to respond is to coordinate Federal and State authorities and resources to ameliorate the destruction after it has occurred, tend to the survivors, and clean up the mess. The other response is to meet those forces where they gather before they hit our shores and prevent the ensuing carnage altogether.

In the case of a Hurricane Katrina off the American coastline, the amelioration response is the only option we have. In the case of radical Jihadist attacks, to wait until the damage is done before responding is madness. And yet, this is just what the Obama Administration is doing.

How else to interpret Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano's confident assertions this weekend that the security system of the United States "worked" in the case of the attempted Christmas day bombing attempt on the Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit?

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In what sense did it work? There was nothing about our security system that prevented a radical Muslim from boarding the plane with a bomb. The only thing that stopped him from carrying out his mission was luck and a lone civilian who disarmed him. What "worked" in the system was that after all of this, Homeland Security efficiently mobilized resources to arrest the alleged bomber, gather the evidence necessary to convict him in a trial of the century to be named later, and promulgate new regulations to prevent this type of attack in the future.

New regulations; sure, that ought to do it. After all, as Ms. Napolitano might have said, new regulations have prevented shoe bombers from threatening our citizens for more than seven years. Presumably we are now all safe from groin bombers, thanks to Ms. Napolitan's quick work.

FEMA, that Bush Administration cur of an emergency response bureaucracy, has now been revamped under Napolitano's experts hands, and she is so enthralled with what she has wrought that she wants to make it a paradigm for Homeland Security. Except, instead of dispatching medical personnel, water, and food to troubled areas, she will dispatch armies of FBI investigators, Federal prosecutors, and bureaucrats to open files, conference up, take down names, mirandize and prosecute.

This is an amelioration strategy, an ex post facto strategy to slam the door closed after the horse has left the barn. Only in this case, the metaphor "horse has left the barn" refers to real American citizens, dead at the hands of murderers.

FEMA type emergency response, of course, is inapposite. Except for Global Warming religious enthusiasts, no one believes FEMA has any conceivable ability to stop a hurricane before it hits our coasts. But Homeland Security has every ability to stop terrorists before they act, as the previous Administration showed for no less than eight years. The fact that Ms. Napolitan won't adopt such an approach borders on incompetence, if not criminal negligence.

Many are now calling for Napolitano's resignation. I would do the same, except I do not think she is in fact incompetent. Instead, she is competently, efficiently, and precisely following her President's orders and policies.

In other words, this is Obama's Homeland Security, and it is he that needs to be fired. Unfortunately for the next American victims, that cannot be accomplished for another three years.