Terror back on the front burner

After months of fighting over the President’s domestic agenda, terror comes to the fore again. The Wall Street Journal offers an interview with Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, our oldest and dearest state sponsor of terrorism. Gadhafi admits that he “comprehends” our anger over Lockerbie;

In an hour-long interview, Col. Gadhafi said he hoped to build a new era of relations with U.S. President Barack Obama — whom he called “my son” during the same U.N. address — and said he wanted to place his nation’s decades-long conflict with Washington in the past.

The Libyan strongman denied his government had purposefully stoked nationalist sentiment surrounding the return home of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, who was convicted of the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jet that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland. Mr. al-Megrahi, who has cancer, was released by Scottish authorities last month on humanitarian grounds.

“My son” – that shows us how much respect he has for our President after Obama’s latest apology to the world. I’m sure the Obama administration will rebuild the respect we’ve lost over the last several months by firing off a cruise missile in the next few months.

WSJ also reports that Iran has opened another uranium enrichment facility;

A U.S. intelligence official said the facility is one the U.S. “has known about for years,” though the government learned more recently that it was being used for uranium enrichment.

The official said the facility is hidden in an underground tunnel complex 30 kilometers north of Qom, Iran’s Holy City. It is built to hold up to 3,000 centrifuges, though it isn’t clear that they’re fully operational yet. The site is located at an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base under the management of the Atomic Energy Association of Iran, though it isn’t clear if many of the people within that organization knew about the enrichment operation.

So all of this wringing of hands the European community has done over a nuclear Iran has given Tehran time to build a bomb-resistant facility, lessening the effect of an Iraeli strike (which is what most of the world has been secretly hoping would happen to solve the problem for them so they could continue to wring their hands).

All of this while US law enforcement rolls up three separate terrorist plots, according to Fox News;

Federal officials said Thursday that the cases are not connected to each other or the major terrorism investigation under way in Colorado and New York.

Michael C. Finton, 29, who also went under the name Talib Islam, was arrested Wednesday in Springfield, Ill., after federal officials said he attempted to set off explosives in a van outside a federal courthouse in the Illinois capital.

Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, 19, was arrested Thursday in Dallas after federal officials said he placed what he believed to be a car bomb in a parking garage beneath the 60-story Fountain Place office tower.

These events have kicked the President’s domestic agenda off of the front page, but they expose the weaknesses in our foreign policy.

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Foreign Policy, Terror War