It was irresponsible of Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, to say last week he has a "gut feeling" that al-Qaida will try to launch a terrorist attack inside the United States this summer. There's not much the rest of the country can do about a "gut feeling" - and yet it's worth considering what would make him say that.
Indeed, a new classified intelligence report says that al-Qaida is better organized than at any time since Sept. 11, 2001. And why is that? Because it has established a haven for itself in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
That is the threat. And anyone watching the siege of the militants in the Red Mosque in Islamabad last week had to be disturbed by the growth of radicalism in a nation five times as large as Iraq, and in possession of nuclear weapons.
This will be the even bigger threat. Yet the U.S. is hopelessly ensnared in Iraq. Four years of war there has done nothing to weaken al-Qaida - because the heart of al-Qaida's operations is far away in Pakistan.
President Bush says the people the U.S. is fighting in Iraq are the same as those who carried out 9/11. This has so little truth to it as to be a virtual falsehood. There is a group called al-Qaida in Iraq, but it is not the most important antagonist there, nor is it a vital organ of al-Qaida.
This alone should be reason enough to redeploy troops out of Iraq, though the absence of progress toward political reconciliation comes a close second. The challenge is to confront the threat. That doesn't mean using U.S. soldiers to combat religious radicalism in Pakistan, but the sooner American resources and energy are extricated from Iraq, the better. And, of course, a U.S. exit from Iraq would remove a principal provocation helping to stoke al-Qaida's recruiting.
Pakistan is not lost to the extremists; religious parties there have performed poorly whenever elections have been held. But President Pervez Musharraf, who came to power in a coup, is deeply unpopular - the unwavering support of the Bush administration notwithstanding. Some worry that Pakistan could go the way Iran did, when that relatively secular country overthrew the shah and became an Islamic republic in 1979.
In 2002, President Bush was content to redeploy U.S. forces out of Afghanistan so he could prepare for his strike on Iraq - though the job was unfinished in Afghanistan, and still is. Nobody called it cutting and running. Today, a much better argument can be made for redeploying out of Iraq, so that the U.S. can devote more than "gut feelings" to its defenses against al-Qaida.