It's easy to answer that question now. No one knew the answer to that a decade ago. No one knows how many lives terrorism will claim in the next decade. The government does have to plan for the worst case scenario.
No more so than the government needs to consider all other scenarios, and the costs of any policy choice in those scenarios, and use the likelihood along with the potential costs and benefits of each scenario in assessing the desirability of the policy.
Otherwise, planning for the worst case scenario just becomes a convenient excuse for policies that make life considerably worse for everyone in the most likely scenario.
None of this answers my question: of all these possibilities, why does the government only go after one?
It seems pretty clear to me that it is the magnitude of resources devoted that concerns him (and myself).
I think a great case can be made for the NSA and other agencies spending too much money "fighting terrorism," but there's no reason to hurt that argument with such an absurd stance.
The above is nuts, right? Yet both bedbugs and terrorists account for a negligible number of American deaths historically. So the above can't be nuts if the equivalent statement about terrorism is non-nuts.
Please explain where I'm wrong, and don't just say I'm "intentionally obtuse".
It's hard for me to believe that you're actually trying to make this argument.
On the scale of deaths overall-- no, it hasn't. That's the point.
No it hasn't, not a single one. Every single case they've "stopped" was simple entrapment of mentally unstable people. If they'd left those people alone nothing would have ever happened.
Tremendous damage to United States infrastructure? What are you talking about? Those buildings damaged and destroyed in downtown Manhattan? Yes, billions of dollars in damage, but way down in the noise in the economy overall. Congress causes more financial damage in a night of gridlock than that.
It's hard for you to believe? Well, believe it. I am making the argument. We react far too hard to terrorism, by several orders of magnitude. It's basically an allergic reaction. The story of terrorism and the US over the past decade and change is pretty much the story of a bee and a person with a bee allergy. Essentially all of the damage is done by the massive overreaction to the sting, not the by the bee. The difference is that we can, at least in theory, simply choose to stop being allergic. The problem won't be solved by overreacting even more.