Terrorism is a serious threat to the US

For 50 years nuclear destruction of the entire planet was a serious threat during the Cold War. Although, thank God, the threat never manifested itself its seriousness and its threatening nature was never in question. Something does not have to be inevitable, nor does it have to continually occur in order to be a serious threat. As with the Cold War example, the threat doesn't even have to be exercised once to be genuine. So if we assess a serious threat solely by its frequency and its scope when it happens we are missing the point. I happen to work in the largest penal colony in the world. It is a prison system that is huge. Yet we have very few incidents of assaults on officers or civilians, relatively speaking. It is wholly unrealistic and incorrect to say that the threat of inmate violence against officers and civilians isn't serious because incidents don't occur often enough. The reason why incidents don't occur is because there are mechanisms in place that act as a buffer between the threat of the inmates and the officers they represent a threat to. Just because a system is successful at suppressing a threat, doesn't mean that threat does not exist, nor is it serious. Ask all of the officers not to show up on Monday to see the prison run entirely by the Bloods, Crips, Latin Kings, and MS-13, in which case it would be clear that the serious threat was always there, despite an apparent dormant state. Had the US not chased after Al Qaeda starting in October 2001, Lord knows how many attacks may have occurred on American soil or against American interests -"may" being the operative word. Terrorists have been met with significant buffers against attacking American soil in the past few years the most significant buffer being the war in Iraq. Al Qaeda fighters fled to Iraq en masse instead of Manhattan or Washington DC displaying their persistent desire for American blood. Another buffer is the cache of Arab leaders that currently willing to suppress to some extent the Islamic fundamentalist element in their country. If US friendly Pakistani and Saudi Arabian governments fell to Islamic Jihadists and that buffer was erased, the serious threat would become a serious reality. Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States back in 1998. If you study the ideology of Arab terrorists, if you survey US intelligence, it is clear that these folks are persistent, they are focused, they have displayed the means and desire to attack, and most importantly they are patient. The 9-11 attacks had years of planning. When trains exploded in Madrid, Spain the justification aired by the terrorists on Al-Jazeera cited Spains treatment of Muslims years ago. Just because the threat isn't often enough to satisfy your definition of serious threat, doesn't mean that when that next attack does occur -and many intelligence experts agree that it is a matter of when and not if- that the previous apparently dormant years would have been any less threatening. The threat is abundant. The seriousness is obvious. And just because more violence occurs elsewhere, or just because 9-11 wasn't wide enough in its scope as would satisfy you to meet your definition of serious or threatening, doesn't make that threat any less real. God bless.