NO PARKING FOR 9/11'S FIFTH

Five years later his nose is out of joint, but he's still the Bullshitter-in-Chief. No, it is not a doctored photo. The AP's Gerald Herbert took the shot. It appeared Thursday, bannered across the bottom of the front page of Metro (scroll down), one of the free daily tabs in New York.

The photo could have served as a poster for "Making New York Safer," a symposium held Friday by the Council on Foreign Relations on the eve of 9/11's fifth anniversary. Though useful as a recap of the latest trends in thinking about terrorism and the so-called "war on terror," the discussions pretty much reiterated what has already appeared in print even in magazines intended for general readers (such as Lawrence Wright's "The Master Plan: What will the next stage of jihad be?" in the most recent issue of The New Yorker).

Still, it was worth being reminded by analysts like R. P. Eddy, a counterterrorism expert, that "the terrorists of the next five to 10 years are a lot closer to the Columbine kids" than to "al-Qaeda central" (Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri et al.) and that the coming wave of "self-radicalized individuals" ought to be regarded as a homegrown police problem -- not a military one in Iraq -- contrary to Cheney doctrine.

Meantime, the funniest remark of the symposium came from an exchange among Steven Simon (co-author of "The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right"), Richard K. Betts (author of "Surprise Attack: Lessons for Defense Planning" and professor of political science who also directs the Institute of War and Peace at Columbia University) and Brian Ross (chief investigative correspondent for ABC News).

SIMON: I'm intrigued by why there have not been [any] car bombs in New York .... Terrorism has turned into urban warfare, and car bombs are the urban warfare weapon par excellence.
ROSS (turning to BETTS): Why not?
BETTS: They probably can't find a parking place.

Finally, it was also worth hearing Stephen E. Flynn (author of "America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect us from Terrorism") complain about the $300 billion being misspent on the war in Iraq -- "That's a burn rate of $250 million a day!" -- as he lamented the abysmal underfunding of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).