Is Islamic terrorism worse than other terrorism?

I'm perusing a Congressional Research Service report on "homegrown jihadism" in the United States—it'll take a bit to digest—but I couldn't help but notice the kicker to this paragraph:

How serious is the threat of homegrown, violent jihadists in the United States? Experts differ in their opinions. In May 2010 congressional testimony, terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman emphasized that it is, “difficult to be complacent when an average of one plot is now being uncovered per month over the past year or more—and perhaps even more are being hatched that we don’t know about.”By contrast, a recent academic study of domestic Muslim radicalization supported by the National Institute of Justice reveals that “the record over the past eight years contains relatively few examples of Muslim-Americans that have radicalized and turned toward violent extremism” and concludes that “homegrown terrorism is a serious but limited problem.” Another study has suggested that the homegrown terrorist threat has been exaggerated by federal cases that “rely on the abusive use of informants.” Moreover, the radicalization of violent jihadists may not be an especially new phenomenon for the United States. Estimates suggest that between 1,000 and 2,000 American Muslims engaged in violent jihad during the 1990s in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya. More broadly, terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins notes that during the 1970s domestic terrorists “committed 60-70 terrorist incidents, most of them bombings, on U.S. soil every year—a level of activity 15-20 times that seen in most years since 9/11.”  Few of the attacks during the 1970s appear to have involved individuals motivated by jihadist ideas.

So, no big deal then, right?

Now, it's true that jihadists scored one really spectacular attack with 9/11—and that attack, not all the small-bore and (mostly) ineffective operations since then is what we've decided to address with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the reorientation of our national security infrastructure over the last decade. It's understandable, if not always laudable.

But the truth is that 1970s radicals were, on an ongoing basis, more deadly than American-grown jihadists. And it's also true that a government agency that points out that fact feels compelled to add something along the lines of: "Sure, the radical hippies committed a lot more bombings. But they weren't Muslim or anything."

Don't celebrate those new job numbers too much.

However, at this pace of job growth, it will be more than two decades before we get back down to the pre-recession unemployment rate. Moreover, a shrinking labor force is not the way we want to see unemployment drop.  At this rate of growth we are looking at a long, long schlep before our sick labor market recovers.

via epi.org

Something is really, really wrong with the economy

The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that in the third quarter, wages as a share of gross domestic product were the lowest they’ve been since 1929, and compensation (that includes health insurance) as a share of GDP was at its lowest point since 1955. Corporate profits as a share of GDP, by contrast, are the highest they’ve been since 1929.

via washingtonpost.com

It's not a depression. But it's depressing.

According to the study, to be released Friday by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers, just 7 percent of those who lost jobs after the financial crisis have returned to or exceeded their previous financial position and maintained their lifestyles.

The vast majority say they have diminished lifestyles, and about 15 percent say the reduction in their incomes has been drastic and will probably be permanent.

via nytimes.com

About those defense budget cuts

Here's a graph from the Congressional Research Service showing what proposed "cuts" to the defense budget mean: We still spend more ... just not quite as fast as we expected to.

Paul Pillar on the Nazi analogy approach to foreign policy

There also is other, broader and longer term damage from the loose, profligate playing of the Nazi card. Repeatedly playing the card represents a failure to discriminate among different levels of threat. That undermines the tailoring of policy responses to make them appropriate for each threat. More specifically, it diminishes appreciation for the enormous magnitude of what the real Nazis did. If even problems that do not come anywhere close to what they did are rhetorically equated with Nazism, then the currency of discourse about human evil is debased. The rhetorical equation undermines understanding of the gigantic scale of the evil that the Nazis perpetrated, including the Holocaust.

via nationalinterest.org

Winning wars is OK. Waging wars is better.

At The National Interest, John Mueller suggests that Obama won't get much electoral lift from winning the Libya war—we're still talking about that?—because presidents rarely do:

Nobody gave much credit to Bush for his earlier successful intervention in Panama, to Dwight Eisenhower for a successful venture into Lebanon in 1958, to Lyndon Johnson for success in the Dominican Republic in 1965, to Jimmy Carter for husbanding an important Middle East treaty in 1979, to Ronald Reagan for a successful invasion of Grenada in 1983, or to Bill Clinton for sending troops to help resolve the Bosnia problem in 1995. Although it is often held that the successful Falklands War of 1982 helped British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in the elections of 1983, any favorable effect is confounded by the fact that the economy was improving impressively at the same time.

Right: Americans expect to win wars, so you don't really get special consideration as president for getting the job done. There's really only two war-related situations that seem to make much of a difference to a president's standing:

• Losing wars is bad. Think LBJ, of course, but even the relative success of the surge in Iraq wasn't enough to overcome Americans' (entirely correct) belief that George W. Bush had mostly prosecuted the war very badly. That led to Democrats' electoral success in 2006 and 2008.

• Going to war, on the other hand, is tremendously good in the short-term. George HW Bush saw his tepid popularity skyrocket when he led the U.N. coalition against Saddam in 1991; his son saw a similar boost after 9/11. A lot of that depends on the perceived justness of the cause; Obama didn't get a boost, most likely, because A) Americans barely cared about the war there, B) American military involvement was mostly kept out-of-sight, and C) his administration didn't do much in terms of rallying around the flag.

And a president has to show himself to be willing to go to war. Every president is scared of looking weak, and certainly political opponents are always willing to scream "appeasement" if a rival country gains an inch anywhere else in the world.

The lesson? Be willing to go to war. Make sure you win it. Losing is really the only part of the equation that is for ... losers.