Jimmy Carter denouces Obama for "Wide spread human rights violations."

[RevDisk]

True, I have NO IDEA HOW to estimate how likely any particular threat is.  I have no way of doing that.
I do know that we ARE in a war with what I consider to be a determined & ruthless enemy.
I find some of your post a bit specious.  
During WW2 we had no idea what the real abilities or the real end goal of our enemies were.  We prepared dor possible invasions -- blacked out lights around port cities and established air raid patrols and such.
It was really only after the war we learned that the Japanese never really intended to take over the U.S.  Hit us with a nuke in San Francisco?  If they could.
In fact they never possessed the ability to stage a real invasion .... unless they gave up their SE. Asia CoProsperity sphere idea and redeployed on an incredibly massive scale....probably something that they just couldn't do, logistically.

The Civil Defense preparations in the US during WWII were propaganda projects, mostly. Say 80%. Being prepared against foreign invasion is always a good idea, don't get me wrong. Main idea was to remind folks on a regular basis of "Yes, we're at war. This excrement is real." I'm not saying this is bad either.

Aside from Hawaii and Alaskan islands...  Zero chance of a successful invasion of the US by Japan. Or Germany. Supply lines. It would have been a turkey shoot. Japan is REAL far away. And not exactly a basket of natural resources. Granted, they could (and did) do quite a bit of damage. Until we converted our industrial base onto a war footing, they could have REALLY done a number on us. They had a lead time on converting their economy to a war footing. Once we did convert?  *snort*

We don't really know so much about the Wahabists now.  What we seem to think is they're disjointed, unled, unorgainized, and capable only of pulling together some homegrown attacks that misfire due to either sheer incompetence or being infiltrated by FBI, ATF, or other LEO, or some associate turns them in.
I am not hardly privy to the kind of intelligence that the government would use to better classify, and or determine just what is going on in the plotters inside AQ and other terrorist organisations.
And I don't think very many others are, either; a condition that will IMO persist until the war IS truly over and a lot of classified stuff is declassified, and history books are written about this time.

We actually do know a far bit. Biggest problem is finding enough folks to speak Arabic and about twenty, thirty other languages. And yes, being disjointed is the primary advantage and disadvantage. There's no central command that can optimally move around resources, do long term recruitment/training, develop doctrine, etc. Flip side, we don't have one happy spot to drop a JDAM.

Terrorism, as a whole, will never go away. Going toe to toe with countries with several thousand times your tech level and military is just plain stupid. It's the ONLY way for minor folks to try to compete with the big dogs. OTOH, it does not tend to have a very high success rate. Even "winning" tends to be a Pyrrhic victory usually.
 

I was not trying to allege you were a "defeatist."   I am surprised that it is not I who is being seen as a "defeatist," in fact, since I am saying that I believe most of America does not seem to have the stomach or patience to bring this war to a resolution.

What I said about the Indians was that we crushed their spirit.  In spite of the fact we have far better technology than they (meaning wahabiists in this sentence) do I am beginning to wonder how that will work out.
The Indians fought very, very well when we met them on the open plains.  They traveled, moved, maneuvered and fought on lighter, faster ponies and showed a superior grasp of tactics and strategy than many of the commanders who led cavalry units against them.  
The one tactic we had that usually worked was hitting them while they were encamped.  That seemed to, however, work too well.  It made the  U.S. Army and the Plains Indian Wars quite unpopular among many eastern cities and hurt the war effort as it led to a number of what were believed (rightly or wrongly) to be outright massacres.  
Wiki Sand Creek Massacre as an example.
Do you recall the phrase "paper tiger?"

Uh. I thought we won by decimating their population and forcing them to move to land no one else wanted. Then significantly outbreed/populated them. The Indians fought well because it was "win or everyone you know and love dies". US Army rarely had the same motivation. Plus our tactics, strategy and logistics sucked often enough. Mostly on the job training. Which works well enough on the long term if you keep up retention.

I don't even know if there is some metric about how the wahabists "spirit" is doing these days.  I don't count ours as being in the "good" catagory -- and that does concern me.

Your experience with people on the state dept. "watch lists" does surprise me.  Not so much that I am envious of that experience .... I have little desire to have anything to do with Kurdish Rebels or others like that.

I apologize to you if I offended you -- and I did come off awfully snarky in that last post.

You may have some good insights into their culture and abilities, but I have a real hard time believing that we are well prepared to deal with whatever level of threats they do pose when our own FBI won't follow through on reports of alien people wanting to learn to fly, but not land or take off, huge airliners.

Meh. They didn't specifically say, "Hey! I was UCK/KLA for a decade"  Plus certain ethnic groups tend to go between "terrorist groups" and "strategic allies" depending on either the POTUS or the mood of State Department. Kurds have been shuffled back and forth at least a dozen times, officially and unofficially.

Ah. You do realize that the majority of terrorists caught in the US as of late have been FBI stings? Both Islamic and the stereotypical "white supremist militia" types. By stings, I mean, either creating them from scratch or doing a raid for folks nodding when a government plant mouths off about doing something stupid.

[TommyGunn]

You do realize that the majority of terrorists caught in the US as of late have been FBI stings? Both Islamic and the stereotypical "white supremist militia" types. By stings, I mean, either creating them from scratch or doing a raid for folks nodding when a government plant mouths off about doing something stupid.

I have heard that ..... yet I keep hearing about "training camps" and other types of "jihadi" schools hidden behind the facade of synagogs.  I hear about Muslim "prayer blankets" found along the paths that Mexicans use as they sneak illegals and drugs into this country from Mexico.  And I wonder what that means......

I thought we won (the Plains Indian Wars) by decimating their population and forcing them to move to land no one else wanted. Then significantly outbreed/populated them. The Indians fought well because it was "win or everyone you know and love dies". US Army rarely had the same motivation. Plus our tactics, strategy and logistics sucked often enough. Mostly on the job training. Which works well enough on the long term if you keep up retention.

The Plains Indians fought well because they knew their people, their land and their abilities.  Remember they were called the Plains Indian Nations.  Many of them fought because they would not be moved to land no one else wanted.  Or moved onto rservations.  This was one of the primary reasosn for the Little Bighorn Expedition in fact.  
There is an element of truth in that we outbred and outpopulated them.  That was one of the reasosn the Indians became so dispirited and which contributed to their undoing at the end of the Plains Indians Wars.
But do not underestimate the Indians' military leaders.  Chiefs Crazy Horse, Gall, and Sitting Bull were geniuses in fighting tactics.  Many Indians had repeating rifles, but let's not neglect an important advantage the upper Paleolithic bow & arrow has; it is not a "line of sight" weapon, necessarily.   One theory posed by historians is that at the Little Bighorn, Sioux & Cheyenne warriors massed behind the rough hilly terrain and volley fired masses of arrows in a ballistic arc over the hill, raining them down on helpless bluecoats, who couldn't even see the Indians to shoot.
High tech is sometimes not quite the advantage we'd like to think it is.

The Civil Defense preparations in the US during WWII were propaganda projects, mostly. Say 80%. Being prepared against foreign invasion is always a good idea, don't get me wrong. Main idea was to remind folks on a regular basis of "Yes, we're at war. This excrement is real." I'm not saying this is bad either.

Aside from Hawaii and Alaskan islands...  Zero chance of a successful invasion of the US by Japan. Or Germany. Supply lines. It would have been a turkey shoot. Japan is REAL far away. And not exactly a basket of natural resources. Granted, they could (and did) do quite a bit of damage. Until we converted our industrial base onto a war footing, they could have REALLY done a number on us. They had a lead time on converting their economy to a war footing. Once we did convert?  *snort*

My parents & grandparents lived through those times; trust me, the civil defense procedures were very real.
One very real concern was the German U-boats. They in fact did cause tremendous damage to shipping and there was reason to worry about major port facilities along the coats.  I once saw a photo of New York City harbor at night.  It was taken through the periscope of a German U-Boot during WW2.  One particularly intrepid U-Boat Commander sailed his U-Boat up Connecticuts' Thames River,  up passed Groton Ct.  Oh, THAT'S where a major U.S. Navy submarine port is located, BTW.
On the Pacific Coast the Japanese Navy's submarines were even more intrepid, actually shelling port facilities and causing minor damage....which caused many to wonder just what else the enemy might accomplish in the future.
I agree there was zero chance of an invasion.  That was never something the Japanese intended to do.  The purpose of the war in their eyes was to eliminate our will to stop them from establshing a "prosperity sphere" in their part of the world.  But at the time most Americans did not know this, and I don't think anyone would believe that until the war was being written about by historians who had access to the records of the Japanese planners.
Germany: ditto.  Hitler basically shot the "wad" when he invaded Russia.