J.R. Labbe: Best defense is on home front

It doesn’t take a treasonous operative of al-Qaida warning that Osama bin Laden still wants his faithful to kill infidels to make Americans understand that the terror threat will last as long as anyone who can read this lives.

The videotape posted last week on www.lauramansfield.com featuring bin Laden mouthpiece Adam Gadahn – the California native who adopted the name “Azzam the American” after converting to Islam – only confirms what we already know.

Yet one American who doesn’t seem to get the message is President Bush.

Bush’s constant justification for the war in Iraq – “We can fight them over there or we can fight them over here” – is pegged to a belief that continued U.S. military presence in Iraq is preventing bin Laden from instructing his followers in Morocco or Indonesia – and almost every place in between – to plan new attacks against the United States.

What Bush has yet to explain is how a war in a small corner of the Islamic world protects Americans from extremists. Islam stretches in an uninterrupted arc from Morocco on the Atlantic Ocean to Indonesia and the Philippines – more than half a world away – in the Pacific Ocean. In the scheme of overall Islamic fundamentalism, Iraq is a sideshow that does not even host the headquarters of al-Qaida terror.

That, by all accounts, is in Pakistan, which Bush describes as an ally in the war on terror, notwithstanding bin Laden’s continued planning from there. If an ally like that is what the United States is fighting for in Iraq, it is obvious that a successful defense against terror will not be mounted in the Islamic world.

Assume for a moment that the United States can install a reliable ally in Iraq. Oh, wait – Iraq is a democracy now. So assume that the Iraqis elect leaders who turn out to be reliable U.S. allies. Assume further that these allies kill or capture every potential terrorist in Iraq.

How much safer would the United States be? Minimally.

Most of the Sept. 11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia. Morocco, often touted as a progressive state allied with the West in its war against terror, is producing more than its share of proven and suspected terrorists. (The bombings in Casablanca on May 16, 2003, and in Madrid on March 11, 2004, were carried out almost entirely by Moroccan men.)

Pakistan apparently seethes with jihadis, whose seemingly unimpeded forays into Afghanistan continue to plague NATO forces there. Four of the six terrorism suspects arrested in the plot to attack Fort Dix, N.J., are ethnic Albanians, a group that the United States was fighting to defend in the latest Balkan wars.

Other terrorists captured around the world hail from a variety of nations – including Great Britain. Regardless of the outcome in Iraq, the globe will teem with potential Islamic fanatics who want to “kill the infidels.”

Fundamental terrorism is not going to be cut off at the roots across the Islamic Crescent. The United States can’t do to the entire world what it is failing to do in Iraq, so national security against the threat will have to be found elsewhere.

Without question, the United States should neutralize identifiable threats whenever and wherever it can, but if recent history proves only one thing, it is that we will never get more than a fraction of those who wish us ill.

The fact that three of the Fort Dix terror suspects were illegally in the United States suggests a good place to start rebuilding U.S. defenses.

The nation’s best defense against terror is to shorten its perimeter and begin asserting control over who and what enter and leave our country. This has been a miserable failure for decades, but having 140,000 of our troops and much of our equipment engaged in a foreign sideshow far away from our defendable lines is not the way to do it.

The troops need to come home from Iraq and become part of a substantial buildup aimed at better watching our entrances and exits. That probably won’t cost any less than the war in Iraq, but it has a much better chance of accomplishing the president’s stated goal of defending the United States from foreign terrorism.