Speaking of nukes aimed at ants ...

The real danger posed by our bloated, redundant security apparatus is not the waste and inefficiency; it's the focus on the wrong target.

Robert Dreyfuss at The Nation explains:

What’s missing from the story, however, is any assessment of the threat against which this vast and growing machinery is arrayed. The Post notes that 25 separate agencies have been set up to track terrorist financing, which admirably shows the overlapping and redundant nature of the post-9/11 ballooning of agencies and organizations targeting terrorism. But the article barely mentions that there are hardly any terrorists to track.

The Post points out that among the recent, nuisance-level attacks by Muslim extremists – the Fort Hood shooter, the underwear bomber, the Times Square incident – the intelligence machine failed to detect or stop them. True. That’s an indictment of the counterterrorism machinery that has become a staple for critics of the outsize budgets and wasteful bureaucracy that has been created since 9/11.

The core problem, which the Post doesn’t address, is that Al Qaeda and its affiliates, its sympathizers, and even self-starting terrorist actors who aren’t part of Al Qaeda itself, are a tiny and manageable problem. Yet the apparatus that has been created is designed to meet nothing less than an existential threat. Even at the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and its allies were engaged in a brutal, country by country battle across Asia, Africa and Latin America to combat the United States, NATO, and American hegemonism, there was nothing like the post-9/11 behemoth in existence. A thousand smart intelligence analysts, a thousand smart FBI and law enforcement officers, and a few hundred Special Operations military folk are all that’s needed to deal with the terrorism threat. It’s been hugely overblown. Yet in the Post story, sage-like gray beards of the counterterrorism machine stroke their chins and pontificate about how difficult it is to coordinate all these agencies, absorb all the data, read all the reports, and absorb the 1.7 billion emails and phone calls that are picked up every day by the National Security Agency. It’s an emperors-new-clothes problem. The emperor isn’t naked, but no one, really, is threatening him.

Read the whole thing.

It reminds me of Molly Ivins' assessment of Ronnie Ray-Gun's "invasion" of Grenada - thousands of U.S. troops against a few dozen Cuban construction workers.

"It could have been handled by a couple of Texas Rangers."