If I were Al Qaeda or Hizballah, I might imagine this is the moment to strike

The Military is very concerned:

Gertz:

Transition vulnerability

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Wednesday that the United States is vulnerable to attack or other incidents during the presidential transition period and that the military is ready to respond.

"When you go back and look at the number of incidents that have occurred three or four months before an inauguration to about 12 months out, back to the '50s, it's pretty staggering the number of major incidents which have occurred in this time frame," Adm. Michael Mullen said, noting that the danger is compounded by current world conditions.

The Sept. 11 attacks, for example, occurred eight months after President Bush took office, at a time when many key appointments had not been made.

All that is true.

However, after what probably appeared to the leaders of the Islamozoids of Khomeinist and Salafi varieties to be staggering to truly crippling losses from the Lehman Bros collapse to the last 2 days of thousand point losses on Wall Street, GM, Chrysler and Ford telling the admin and their unions (who have just won a great poltical victory) that they need $25B before Jan 20th, or there will be 50-100k unemployed, and another 750k workers who supply them, and Toyota whose hybrid vehicles lead the world, and build MANY HERE, posting 68% revenue drops, after 30-40% drops by Nissan and BMW......we have what might look like a teetering capitalist world which might be permanently set back, if say, Abqaiq was destroyed, or several tankers sunk in the Strait of Hormuz, or if an attack on Wall Street, or Fleet St. could be carried out, or a dirty bomb say in Naples or Tokyo, or 'better yet', Osaka or Hiroshima.

These execrable miscreants might actually think they could free their brethren from the yoke of capitalism, and the corrupted leaders of their own nations.

They would be tragically wrong, but so were the Germans and Japanese who had much better intelligence.

What is similar are the cultural errors of the enemy about our responses in both the short and long term. If things get bad enough, I have no doubt that Mecca is on a list somewhere, even for a calculator like Mr. Obama. However, I wonder if they think that way.

But they may very well conclude that with one big push and a little luck we will be so concerned with our own situation, and desperation as a result of one or several devastating attacks that they can have their way in their own desert.

Perhaps a little Israeli attention to Natanz and Arak might refocus their attention.

There is nothing quite like the initiative.