And what if???

"This is the kind of 4th of July fireworks we don't want!"

The 4th of July weekend is coming up starting Friday. It will be fun. It will be on a weekend. It will be a family event. And - once again it will be a juicy target for the Islamists. What? Give me a break! Enough of this phobia about the Islamists! But wait just a minute. What if, what if, the most current terror alert is correct? Could we handle even a low grade attack like they recently have had overseas?

If you don't think any of the Islamist groups would love to knock us out, I have some coastal  land in Iowa to sell you. It has been reported any one of these groups would like to ruin the day for us - especially the celebration of our Independence Day. The best case scenario is this terror alert is a false flag or false alarm. And then we end up being nothing except a wonderful three day weekend in the middle of summer. The worse case however, it will be something bad. The really, really worse case is it will be really bad - catastrophic. For example, if the bad guys are planning to bring a small nuke or dirty bomb into this country, most probably over our southern border. That would be a game changer.

When I served in the Navy, I had a high level clearance for over 20 years. During that time, I learned one very important thing. What is disclosed to the public, and what is known to our government is very often very dissimilar. In other words, what we don't know can hurt us. If the Islamists launch a soft target attack, something slightly larger, or even a dirty (or not so dirty) nuke attack, it will be a game changer. The war will once again have come to our shores.

What concerns me the most about this newest bunch (ISIL), is how brazen they have become. It is almost as if they are goading us into a fight. It could be the butchery they use to kill innocent men women and children. Or their symbolic killing of gays right after our SCOTUS ruling. It almost seems that the more we ignore them, the more brazen they become. Bringing the war over here would easily fit into their modus operandi.

So what can we do? Really, not much except pray that our government is one step ahead of these guys. At home you can bunker up. Have enough food and water on hand to last for a week or so. A month would be better.  As the saying goes, "the bad guys only need to be right once". And they are learning from their past mistakes, their past failures. Once they find that crack in our defenses, they might try to get a small nuke or dirty bomb smuggled into Houston, Phoenix, even on to our Navy base at San Diego.

So with our terror alert for this coming weekend firmly in place, we can only hope and pray our government is prepared to stop or thwart all threats. For many of us, this is the best week of the summer, maybe of the year. We owe it to ourselves to be able to relax and enjoy. Unfortunately, that is what makes it all the more tempting for bad guys.