Tuesday, March 28, 2006

This doesn't make me feel safer

I've long held the view that our approach to fighting terrorism is not rational, nor cost effective, having recently mused that our approach to preventing terrorism seems to be the equivalent attempting to put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it.

Now a report has been released that a team of government investigators were able to smuggle enough radioactive material into the United States in order to produce two dirty bombs (see here for the story.) Isn't that unacceptable five years after 9/11? Wouldn't we have been better off devoting our resources to practical means of making us safer rather than ideological fantasy missions in Iraq? We've spent two hundred plus billion dollars in Iraq and the final cost could run into the trillion dollar range. What if we had put that money into securing our borders and ports, into funding the Coast Guard, into securing our chemical and nuclear plants. What if instead of squandering our diplomatic influence by undermining the UN and disregarding international treaties we had worked towards securing loose nuclear materials around the world and strengthening the non-proliferation treaty.

Shouldn't this have been the priority?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Indeed, strengthening some of the existing agencies rather than creating the bloated DHS might've been a more productive response to 9/11 than what happened.