Obama tried to lull US into complacency

Telegraph:

In his State of the Union address to the American people earlier this year, Barack Obama declared that he was "confident" of achieving "our objective of defeating the core of al-Qaeda".

Although he acknowledged the need to pursue the "remnants" of the terrorist group and its affiliates, the overall message was clear – al-Qaeda was badly degraded, the tides of war were receding and the US was winning this fight that was no longer even officially a war.

The Boston bombings would appear to present a fundamental challenge to that assessment and once again bring the nagging uncertainty of terrorism back on to the American main street.
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They bring home the complexity of the global Islamist threat and the fact that it cannot be confined to wars in distant lands, or fought at arm's length using drones, as the Obama administration has quietly yet insistently led America to believe.

Mr Obama and his intelligence community know the threat from al-Qaeda affiliates, but have chosen to downplay it to the US public.

Even when that fight does directly touch on American lives, as it did last September when the US ambassador to Libya was murdered in Benghazi by an al-Qaeda linked group, the administration appears at pains to deny the connection.

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...  the threat from al-Qaeda is too amorphous and shifting to ever have been discounted.

"They've fallen into the same trap that the Bush administration did early on," says Tom Jocelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank who tracks the movements of high-value al-Qaeda targets.

"They define al-Qaeda as a hierarchical terrorist organisation such that if you kill 'x' number of leaders then the whole thing falls apart."

But the early information on the Tsarnaev brothers – born in Kyrgyzstan to a Chechen family, but living in the US for up to a decade – points to just how blurred, in reality, the distinctions between al-Qaeda and its affiliates can become.

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The problem is we don't always know which followers of Islam are going to be pit bulls who go off on the "sudden jihad" syndrome.  In this case we did have a warning about the older brother that was too easily discounted, but it should have been a warning that he needed to be monitored.