Obamaland is America in Retreat

America's president continues to abdicate world leadership to the
vagaries of luck and that long "arc of history." Speaking about ISIS on
Monday, in a press conference
at the G-20 meeting in Antalya, Turkey, Obama declared himself "too
busy" for "posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or
America winning." 

The Next Failure of Imagination: Nuclear Terrorism? | PJ Media

BY CLAUDIA ROSETT NOVEMBER 20, 2015

In exploring how and why America failed to avert the al Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, despite a warning system "blinking red," the 9/11 Commission Report listed, among other things, a failure of imagination. In the multitude of jihadi terrorist attacks since then, there have been horrors enough that there might seem little left to imagine. Monstrous acts have been inflicted on people going about their daily lives in -- to name just some of the cities targeted -- Madrid, London, Amsterdam, Mumbai, Benghazi, Nairobi, Sydney, Ankara, Copenhagen, Bamako and Paris. Add to this the depravities of al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al-Shabaab in Somalia, ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and the declared dedication of Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza, to the annihilation of the democratic Jewish state of Israel.

But is there yet another failure of imagination in the making, on a scale that could dwarf the horrors that have become ritually familiar in the headlines? Is the clock ticking toward some unimaginable midnight of terrorism gone nuclear?

Not that no one has imagined this. Thriller writers from Tom Clancy to Vince Flynnhave imagined it in detail, Hollywood has made movies about it, policy experts have held conferences and written papers, government committees have delved into it, and there are government security procedures and agents trying to monitor and thwart any such catastrophe.

But do the folks in the cockpits of western policy take this threat seriously? No such attack has happened to date. In the habitual human calculus that tends to amount to an expectation that somehow it won't; that however real the danger, the chances of it happening are still a matter of improbable odds. It still belongs to the realm of fiction.

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