The "surge" is a deliberate distraction, and not just from Britney's scalp. The real news is elsewhere. The system is "blinking red."

We're in a curious period right now, Frank Rich writes.  We're in a much the same mood we were in during the summer of 2001: unheeding and unsuspecting.   'The system 'was blinking red,' as the C.I.A. chief George Tenet would later tell the 9/11 commission. But no one, from the White House on down, wanted to hear it."

America is getting warnings and we're not paying any attention.  Last week a front-page article in the New York Times began with this:

Senior leaders of Al Qaeda operating from Pakistan have re-established significant control over their once-battered worldwide terror network and over the past year have set up a band of training camps in the tribal regions near the Afghan border, according to American intelligence and counterterrorism officials.

The warnings are there to be seen.   Who's watching?  Terrorism experts are, and they're all over the media, not just on the front page of the Times.  Rich points out:

• Michael Scheuer, the former head of the C.I.A. bin Laden unit, told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann last week that the Taliban and Al Qaeda, having regrouped in Afghanistan and Pakistan, “are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States” (the real United States, that is, not the fictional stand-in where this same scenario can be found on “24”).
• Al Qaeda is “on the march” rather than on the run, the Georgetown University and West Point terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman told Congress.
• Tony Blair is pulling troops out of Iraq not because Basra is calm enough to be entrusted to Iraqi forces — it’s “not ready for transition,” according to the Pentagon’s last report — but to shift some British resources to the losing battle against the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.

"This is why the entire debate about the Iraq 'surge' is as much a sideshow as Britney’s scalp," and this is why those of us who opposed and continue to oppose the war in Iraq are righter than even we knew. 

Bush's deliberate, trumped-up war in Iraq is responsible for turning our attention away from the real threat while the real threat grows exponentially.  Rich writes, "The surge supporters who accuse the Iraq war’s critics of emboldening the enemy are trying to deflect attention from their own complicity in losing a bigger battle: the one against the enemy that actually did attack us on 9/11."

The record so far suggests that this White House has done so twice. The first defeat, of course, began in early December 2001, when we lost Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora. The public would not learn about that failure until April 2002 (when it was uncovered by The Washington Post), but it’s revealing that the administration started its bait-and-switch trick to relocate the enemy in Iraq just as bin Laden slipped away.

So we're back where we started.  The warning light is blinking red, furiously; Bush is "surging" elsewhere and making speeches about how we've defeated the Taliban.   

Al Qaeda is stronger than ever.  The "surge"?  More bullshit -- very, very dangerous bullshit.

NB: Steve Clemons has more on this, and more coming.