John Kerry has now promised to wage a more “sensitive” war on terror. There’s a campaign theme! And what else? Jackson Browne for Secretary of Defense?

If the Bush/Cheney operation cannot ensure that the whole country has heard this one by Election Day, then they just don’t know their business.

It so powerfully sums up how Kerry thinks – and everything that’s wrong with that thinking.

This president and administration have taken a lot of heat this election season. But the more clearly Americans see the alternative, the more the heat will be reversed. That transduction gets going in earnest at the Republican convention at the end of this month. Blogging will resume at that time: Have a good summer, one and all.

Sen. Kerry suddenly seems determined to make an issue of drug reimportation from Canada.

Up until now, Kerry has been much the more popular candidate among Canadians. This latest stance of his may change their minds. Some (not all) drugs are indeed cheaper in Canada than in the United States. The main reason is that the provincial governments do most of the drug-buying up here. This near single-purchaser situation puts great power in the hands of the provincial governments, which they can then use to ratchet drug prices downward. The provinces obtain extra power because the drug companies know that if they refuse to sell at the price the provinces set, then Canada may simply void their patent protection and license their products to local manufacturers: It has happened before.

Canadians do gain some benefit from this one-sided situation at the expense of American drug buyers. The Canadian price may reimburse the drug companies for the cost of manufacturing existing drugs – but it does not suffice to pay the cost of developing new drugs. With Canada and Europe too imposing artificially low prices on the drug-makers, they end up recovering their costs of innovation in the less-regulated American market. That hurts Americans and especially American seniors.

What would happen if drug re-importation were allowed? In the very short run, some Americans would pay less, perhaps. But the drug companies have a pretty fair idea of how much of their product is genuinely consumed inside Canada. And they would respond to drug re-importation by curbing their sales in Canada to the amount they calculated should satisfy local demand. They might however make a mistake or two – and if they did, Canadians could find themselves facing shortages of the drugs on the reimportation list.

And that would be that for Kerry’s popularity up north.

More seriously, though, drug re-importation is a cheap and cynical non-solution to a real problem: the unfairness of asking Americans to pay the whole cost and more of new drugs while the rest of the world pays less. But it’s no kind of answer to cut prices in the US: In that case, innovation could disappear entirely. The answer is to share the cost more widely within the developed world – an answer that US trade negotiaters are beginning to press hard.

So here’s the real question for Sen, Kerry on drug prices: Will he stand up for American pharmaceutical-makers – and global pharmaceutical-users – by calling for a fair sharing through trade of the costs of innovation, as the Bush administration and FDA Commissioner Mark McClellan have been doing? Or does he just want to score points now – at the price of denying Americans access to potential drugs of the future?

So President Bush did go with Porter Goss for CIA, disregarding my advice to try John Lehman instead. Well, maybe it’s for the best – Goss brings certain advantages all his own to the table, including swift confirmability.

And anyway, I’m beginning to think that maybe the weakest link in America’s intelligence system isn’t the spooks who generate the intelligence. The weakest link may be the users, the policymakers. But then, the users, the policymakers are ultimately elected. So maybe the problem is us.

That’s the question that keeps hitting me as I read and reread the 9/11 report this summer. Yes, it tells of many disturbing intelligence failures. But even more disturbing are the intelligence successes – the many times that Osama bin Laden was within reach in 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001 and yet still nothing was done.

Why not? Well ultimately because decision-makers flinched from the consequences of making a mistake. They feared alienating world opinion and offending and upsetting the voters. In other words – they didn’t act because they weren’t sure that the public wanted them to act.

Now we can blame policymakers for shirking the responsibilities of leadership. But let’s ask a different question: Were they wrong?

Suppose that the Clinton administration had done as Richard Clarke had demanded and launched a massive raid on the al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan – and suppose that a couple of hundred Afghan women and children had been killed along the way. What would the reaction have been in this country?

Or suppose that the government had indeed launched a massive manhunt in August 2001 for the 9/11 hijackers inside this country – how would Americans have responded to federal agents pulling men who matched their profile out of air-security lines for extra questioning?

The questions can be piled up. We’re not going to get an intelligence service that takes risks until its leaders know that the public will accept that risks sometimes go wrong, sometimes badly wrong. Accepts – and forgives.

Any sign of that? Not much, not in the current media environment anyway. The current environment accepts bold risky intelligence strategies that succeed – while reserving the right to brutally condemn those that fail. Not exactly a good formula for curing gun-shyness.

The novelist Nicholson Baker may not be much of a writer, but he certainly has a gift for publicity. His latest brainwave is a novel in which the characters debate whether or not to attempt to assassinate President Bush. In this weekend’s New York Times Leon Weiseltier rightly calls Baker’s book “scummy.”

Who else will join Weiseltier? I suspect that the answer from the literary world will be: surprisingly few. The book won’t collect many accolades – but neither will it or its author be condemned as self-evidently beyond the pale of decent society. The language of the Bush haters has grown so intemperate, so wild, so often frankly crazy that even a desperate character like Baker seems to have gone only slightly further than the rest. We can all hope that the ugly language of the Bush haters does not incite some feeble-minded person to actual violence. But can we not also hope that the Bush haters might get a grip on themselves and appreciate the harm they are doing to the country – and to their own souls?

So here we are in the midst of the most urgent and specific terror warning since 9/11 – and as it goes on, the FBI catches two leaders of a mosque in Albany trying to purchase a shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missile. We do not yet know what target the two would-be purchasers had in mind, but we do know that this kind of mosque-based violence and extremism is not exactly a freakishly rare event, to put it mildly.

Yet here is the reaction to the arrest of the nation’s highest-profile Islamic advocacy group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations:

"The government's allegations against the two men are deeply troubling to the American Muslim community. We strongly support any legal efforts to ensure the safety and security of our nation. As the investigation goes forward, we must all remember that every defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law and that the alleged actions of individuals should not be used to tar an entire community with the brush of terrorism.

"All too often, these types of cases are used by those with political or
religious agendas to smear Muslims and to demonize Islam. We should stick
to the facts of the case and avoid generalizations and stereotypes that
only serve to create societal divisions and promote anti-Muslim bigotry.”

One excellent way to remove societal divisions and defeat bigotry would be for groups like CAIR to use their influence to enhance the security of the country rather than weaken it.

CAIR might for example urge American Muslims to cooperate fully with the FBI and other security organizations. It does the opposite.

CAIR could condemn terror-funding organizations like the Holy Land Foundation. Instead, CAIR is promoting rallies in support of the group’s director, Mohammad el-Mazein.

It could support the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. It has opposed both.

Or it could lend its strength to improvements in airline security. Yet as Heather MacDonald reported yesterday in a characteristically trenchant piece in the Wall Street Journal, CAIR and other American Islamic groups helped to scupper the CAPPS-2 airline passenger identification system, a system that would have matched four basic pieces of information – name, address, date of birth, and telephone number – against government databanks to check for terrorist connections.

Back in 1997, lobbying by CAIR and other Islamic groups fatally weakened the first CAPPS system – the system that pinpointed 11 of the 19 9/11 hijackers, but then did nothing to keep them off their flights. You might think that record would have caused CAIR and its allies some guilt or at least embarrassment. Yet three years after 9/11, these groups are still actively undermining American security.

Well, we know what CAIR is and what interests it serves.

But unfortunately it is not alone. It is backed by almost every organized Muslim group in this country in its lack of interest in the security problem inside the mosques and in its fierce opposition to new measures to protect the nation from that problem. American citizens, including Muslim citizens, have broad rights. Those rights should and must be honored. But citizens, including Muslim citizens, have responsibilities too. When will we see the emergence of an American Muslim group that accepts those?