Senator Kerry’s comments for an article in the New York Times Magazine over the weekend have already drawn a fair bit of attention, even sparking a new Bush-Cheney ad. “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance,” said Kerry, “'As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise.”

The focus to date has been on Kerry’s apparent equating of terrorism with prostitution and illegal gambling. The Bush campaign ad placed it alongside his earlier comments, noting that he considers terrorism not so much a military as a law enforcement problem. However, from what I’ve read so far, the quote contains an even more damning sentiment which has yet to be picked up upon.
Let’s read that quote again and consider exactly what Senator Kerry said, “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance.” We have to “get back to the place we were”? What place is that? He says it’s, “where terrorists are not the focus of our lives” which I take to mean the world before September 11th. But let’s consider the deeper implication of what he’s said and what he means. When he speaks of terrorists once more being a “nuisance”, I take him to be saying that he regards the attacks which came before September 11th (the USS Cole, the attempted bombing of LAX, the Embassy Bombings, the Khobar Towers, the first World Trade Centre bombing, the bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut), attacks which killed hundreds of people, to be nothing more than a “nuisance”.

All of this demonstrates a fundamental ignorance on the part of Senator Kerry. The only real difference between the first World Trade Centre attack in 1993 and the second in 2001 is that the attackers in 2001 had better organization and planning. Their intent was the same. If the 1993 terrorists had a bigger bomb or a better plan, who knows what would have happened. Does John Kerry really believe that this, a serious attempt to kill thousands of Americans, was merely a “nuisance”? Does he believe the same about the plans of the same cell to attack transportation infrastructure in New York City? Does he believe that, had it gone off, al-Qaeda’s plan to attack LAX to mark the start of a new millennium would have been a tolerance “nuisance”?

From all of this we can come to one of two conclusions. The first is that John Kerry, on a personal level, has never really thought about or studied the enemy that we face today. The second is that he has examined it and come to the following set of conclusions:

1) Enhanced large-scale Homeland Security operations can thwart most terrorist attacks.
2) A few dozen Americans killed, on average, each year is a tolerable and inevitable thing which must be reluctantly accepted.
3) Responding to 9-11 level events with a campaign like that in Afghanistan should keep bigger terrorist events to a low level.
4) The effects of large-scale terror (most notably nuclear terror) are so potentially cataclysmic that they aren’t really worth thinking about, planning for, or working against. This would, of course, mirror Kerry’s view on the possibility of nuclear conflict with the USSR during the 1980’s.

This is, of course, the way that many people plan. “Minor” wrongs can be safely ignored or minimized, larger wrongs can be responded to, and the worst-case scenario can be ignored because, in the event it comes to pass, everything that’s gone before will be out the window anyways. The latter is how, in day-to-day life, I’ve respond to people’s fears of the worst-case. Someone will say that, “if I lock that in, and you go bust, I won’t be insured beyond the Federal limit,” and I’ll say, “look, if this place goes bust it’ll be because there’s been a nuclear war or general economic collapse, in which case you’ll have bigger things to worry about.” So Kerry’s view, if that’s what it is (as I’ve said elsewhere, the good Senator typically likes to leave people guessing and speculating what he actually means as though he were a Delphic oracle), is logical, at least so far as John Kerry is concerned on a personal level.

Kerry’s view sounds like one designed to manage the problem while he gets in the two terms as President that he believes were promised to him at birth. It would leave the final resolution to some later date, some later President. “Please God (or Goddess),” says the Kerry view, “just let me get through today without anything going wrong.” It is a strategy for survival, not a plan for victory. It will not make America safer.

You see, it isn’t so much that John Kerry isn’t interested in defending America from the terrorists. He’s very bothered by the threat of terrorism and very interested in seeing it dealt with. It’s just that he has other priorities at the moment.