Yes, They Have Forgotten.

Jim Geraghty says that the MSM has lost any interest in the War on Terror. He bases that belief in lage part on the fact that two very significant stories have been mostly ignored in the American press.

One was in Canada (with serious links to the US, Britain, and other countries):

The 12 men charged in Friday’s massive police operation range in age from 19 to 43 and are residents of Toronto, Mississauga and Markham, Ont., while the five youths cannot be identified under the Youth Criminal Justice Act…

Police allege the 17 were involved in a plot to stage a massive terrorist attack by fashioning explosives out of three tonnes of ammonium nitrate fertilizer — three times the quantity used in the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people in 1995.

The arrests were made after suspects tried to purchase the fertilizer from undercover investigators who were mounting a sting operation, the Toronto Star reported.

The other in Britain:

British anti-terrorist police are hunting for a “dirty” chemical bomb that could be used in an attack in Britain after a major raid failed to uncover a device they believe exists, newspapers reported on Saturday.

More than 250 officers, some wearing chemical, biological and radiological protection suits, shot one man and arrested another during a dawn raid on an east London house on Friday…

Some newspapers, citing unnamed security sources, said police believed suspected militants had made a “dirty” chemical device — a conventional bomb surrounded by toxic material that could be set off by a bomber wearing a suicide jacket.

“We are absolutely certain this device exists and could be used either by a suicide bomber or in a remote-controlled explosion,” one source told the Sun newspaper.

Newspapers quoted security chiefs who they said believed an attack was imminent, with possible targets including the underground train network or pubs crowded with fans watching the soccer World Cup tournament which starts next week.

Those certainly are big stories, bigger because they are reports of foiled attacks, not attacks with thousands of dead and major buildings reduced to ruin. Geraghty goes on to note that there have indeed been more terrorist attacks since 9/11, but those attacks have been nothing even close to what Osama bin Laden threatened and there have been no attacks at all here in America, bin Laden’s prime target.

There are plenty of reasons for that, the largest being that we actually realized for a while that we were in a war and started to fight back. Folks have complained, with good reason, that the nebulously-named “War on Terror” has not been fought as well as we would have all hoped, and certainly not with the attention to keeping the war in the front of our minds that it should have.

That doesn’t mean, though, that our effrts have been in vain. They have not. They have, by any measure, been spectacularly successful.

I distinctly remember the widespreads predictions of disaster that preceded our invading Afghanistan and toppling the Taliban. I dare say that we saw more about the disastrous Soviet adventure there in the couple of months before our soldiers landed than we did while it was happening and the “historic” comparions were thick on the ground. Pundits far and wide called it a “quagmire” even before we arrived.

But they were wrong.

Though it is certainly no garden spot, today’s Afghanistan is a better place to live, especially if you are a woman or a gay person who does not like being crushed under a stone wall. It improves slowly and, at times, haltingly, but we have to remember that it was not long ago that the country was only a small step or two out of the Stone Age.

raq, too, is proving to be a victory. Popular talking points notwithstanding, what has happened there has never been done in the history of the world. Only a few short years ago, Iraq was in the grip of a totalitarian fresh from not one but two genocides, one of which involved the worst ecological “crime” ever seen. At least a million people who ran afoul of Saddam Hussein simply disappeared into his secret prisons. Saddam Hussein funded terrorism openly and without shame He gave succor to international outlaws (though it seems that his affection for al-Qaeda was greater than his love for Abu Nidal) without fear. He daily violated the 1991 cease-fire and flaunted those violations brazenly. Those we could not intimidate into submission he simply bought with his oil fortune.

What is there now? Violence, certainly. There is no doubt that terrorists equipped and trained in Syria and Iran have been flowing over the borders for years, intent on breaking the resolve of the newly-elected government before it can gain any stability whatsoever. Their goal is simple: to convince Iraqis that democracy is not for them. There is also no doubt that there are factions inside Iraq that would love nothing more than to return to the old days when they sat at the right hand of the despot and received all his largesse. Those factions have been doing their best to destroy the democratic political process through any means necessary. It is also true that the new Iraqi government is having serious problems with corruption and would-be mini tyrants. The old habits of politics in Iraq dies very hard indeed.

To be very sure, we have not fought the second war – the war to guard, shelter, and strengthen the fledgeling democracy – nearly as wisely as we should. Critics of this war can rightly point to dozens of mistakes the administration has made in Iraq since the statue fell that have prevented the democracy from growing as quickly or as solidly as many of us would have hoped it would. I admit, I’m sorely disappointed that we have not crushed the insurrection as we should have. I believe that we failed in not closing Iraq’s borders and making it very clear both to Iran and Syria that we would brook no interference there. The CPA turned out, largely, to be a monumental failure – a sure sign that what we should not import to Iraq is our new penchant for crippling and ineffective bureaucracy – that wasted tons of public good will both here and there. Those mistakes allowed the vocal members of the anti-war party and their syncophants to gain traction they never should have gained and credibility that thei do not deserve. For that I blame the President entirely.

But I’m also no fool. I understand that what has happened in Iraq thus far has happened with dizzying speed. Iraq went from tyranny to a ratified Constitition in less than three years. It took us 11 to get to the same point. It has a growing professional army, not made mostly of conscripts, that owes its alliegance not to a dictator but to a government of, by, and for the people. It has a government that has never before been seen in an Arab country, not ever. There is a great public will there for success and an optimism from the Iraqi people that the lives they face is more hopeful and filled with greater potential than they’ve ever known. The terrorists in Iraq are, by their own admission, losing in nearly every way.

They way they aren’t losing is the same way that international terrorists are not losing around their world. Though their organizations are shriveled husks of what they were five or six years ago, though they are finding themselves not as welcome where they were once at home, though their funding has decreased greatly, though their Islamist ways are finding less purchase in places like Indonesia, Egypt, Pakstan, the UAE, Yemen, and elsethere, they still are winning the propaganda war.

This is where Geraghty’s point is most important. The MSM, for the most part, has forgotten that we’re fighting a global war that has been waged against us since at least the early 1990s. I’d argue that their lack of interest in war reporting began the moment they were able to narrow the focus of the war to toppling Afghanistan, or to attempting to convince us that Iraq wasn’t part of that war. They have forgotten how large al-Qaeda was and how easily terrorist groups share money and equipment and personnel. They have forgotten, thanks to their own boycott, that going back to sleep while the wolves are at the door cost us 3000 lives. I believe that Geraghty’s conclusion is right on the money.

So the lesson of recent years – and oh, how I pray some London cops catch the chemical vest guy if he’s out there – has been that we’re on our own in this. I don’t mean that the U.S. is alone; I mean those of us who want to follow the war on terror. To be well-informed about progress in the war on terror, you need the blogs and specialty publications. The mainstream media has lost interest in the war on terror.

The message from the MSM is crystal-clear. Go back to sleep. There’s nothing to worry about at all.

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Category: Fighting the Islamists, Oh, THAT liberal media.