Yes, friends, we do still have a color coded terror alert system (not heard from since just after the 2004 Democratic National Convention) and it’s cranked up to red after this week’s thwarted terror plot in Britain. Another hijacking plan involving long-distance flights, this time apparently focusing on ten aircraft, though I believe the 9/11 strategy originally called for more than 4 or 5 planes. Bush’s comments following the announcement seemed particularly rambling and incoherent, covering the usual talking points about those who “hate our freedoms,” then stumbling off even further into numbskull territory. His painfully qualified-sounding observation that we are “safer than we were on 9/11” sounded a bit like when he was lowballing the number of Iraqi dead to “around thirty thousand”, give or take. This man should never work without a script. In any case, the national security establishment was full of self-praise at having averted a major catastrophe of the type we can expect to see attempted with greater frequency in the months and years ahead, thanks to their ham-fisted policies over the last five years. So, well done… I think.

Still, this near miss (or as George Carlin might term it, “near hit“) fills me with dread. Maybe it’s just paranoia born of anticipating the inevitable fallout from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, but I can’t help but wonder – why such an obvious scenario? Why attempt an attack using the very system that is most closely watched by the authorities? Might this be an elaborate diversion, a rouse to distract us from some far more novel operation now in progress? I hope not, but I know this has occurred to others besides myself. It would be reckless to assume that this would never have occurred to groups like al Qaeda, as well. The malign brilliance of the 9/11 plot was that it completely blind-sided our national security establishment and used the failings of our profit-obsessed commercial aviation system and the atrophied regulatory bodies that oversee it as weapons against us, to terrifying effect. Someone – I doubt bin Laden – was bright enough to look closely at our society, discern where the structural weaknesses are, and proceed accordingly. If they’re smart enough to pull that off, it seems to me they’re probably too smart to rely solely on a plot that uses those same resources, which while still vulnerable are much more highly scrutinized by intelligence and law enforcement than they were prior to September 2001.

So while our homeland security secretary and various anti-terrorism officials pat themselves on the back for a job well done, there may be some more subtle conspiracy under way on the part of the “evil doers”. Lord knows we’re open to attack across a broad spectrum of the national infrastructure, from ground transportation to chemical plants to power generation facilities and so on. Our homeland security funding is a shambles, with money being sent in all kinds of strange directions per the usual congressional pork-barrel allocation process. Just a few miles from where I live, there’s a training facility where people in hazmat suits practice for the terror attacks of yesteryear, effectively closing the door on that empty barn. Sure, it generates a few jobs and it makes it look like our politicians are doing something to make us safer, but when you’ve got a top-level leadership that doesn’t think New York City has any important landmarks worth protecting; one that has demonstrated its inability and unwillingness to respond to predictable disasters like Katrina; a national political culture that has done more to breed terrorism in the last five years than Osama might have dreamed possible in 2000, there’s no question but that we have a major problem here.

By the way, we now have a cease fire agreement for Lebanon that allows the IDF to keep dropping bombs “defensively.” More payback on the way, I expect… so keep your heads down, my friends.

If there was ever any doubt in anyone’s mind that the U.S. has been an obstacle to peace, it’s certainly gone now. It’s kind of appalling to watch the world grope for a way to accommodate George Bush’s and Ehud Olmert’s preconditions for a cease fire in Lebanon. As foreign ministers and diplomats haggle at the U.N., people continue to die in the Levant. Israel attacked a hospital in southern Lebanon, capturing what it described as Hezbollah fighters but what a Hezbollah parliamentarian said were civilians, several of whom were in their 50s. The Hezbollah guy challenged Israel to show the people they captured, but quite frankly, the same demand might be made regarding any of the thousands of detainees Israel holds without charge. Now the IDF is pursuing a push up to the Litani, strafing little fishing boats south of Beiruit, while Hezbollah is promising to respond by targeting Tel Aviv.

This would be a real good time for everyone to stop the hostilities, don’t you agree? Well… even if you do, George Bush doesn’t and neither does the Israeli government, not just yet. Their determination to attain political objectives through wanton violence differs from the tactics of Bin Laden only in scale – Dubya’s attack on Iraq dwarfs the 9/11 death toll by an enormous factor, and Olmert’s war against Lebanese society has the potential to do the same. The Bush administration’s craven insistence that this is somehow going to lead to a better Middle East underscores the contention that this is a deliberate escalation of hostilities and yet another war of choice in that troubled region. Now Dubya’s off for a ten-day break at his ersatz ranch in Crawford, Texas, there to hack away at scrub with various power tools as a small army of secret service men try to look like ranch hands and talk into their cufflinks. I suppose if he’s going to sit on his hands, he might as well do it there. (How like Nero’s fiddle is Bush’s chain saw – scratching away tunelessly as the empire burns.)

Even as the middle east is drenched in blood (Iraq, of course , continuing its slide toward the total anarchy Bush terms “freedom”), there was also time enough to crow about Fidel Castro’s health problems, as the key Bush constituency of Cuban exiles celebrated in Miami and major news outlets pondered what Washington’s “options” might be. My hometown newspaper ran an interesting little chart that compared various socio-economic statistics in Cuba and the U.S. – a comparison in which Cuba fared quite well, actually. Pretty remarkable when you consider the difference in available resources and the fact that Cuba has been under embargo for decades. Far more instructive would be a similar comparison between Cuba and, say, Guatemala or Honduras, since that is the model that America’s political culture would like to see Cuba adopt, post-Castro. Troubled as Cuba’s living standard is, it’s not anywhere near as miserable as that of its neighbors, whose economies are totally supine to U.S. economic power. Even so, the press opines how Cuba is a “nation ripe for economic change” and how its “enormous pent-up consumer demand” and 97 percent literacy rate make “Cuba’s workforce… hungry to work and full of potential.”

Perhaps someone should ask the Cubans in Cuba whether or not they want the Guatemalan model for economic misery. While they’re at it, they should ask the Iraqis, as well.