One of the key features of the Bush Administration was the use of national security threats, way out of proportion to reality, to justify wars or civil liberties takeaways or whatever else. Over eight years, the public got so used to this kind of hyperbole that they can easily be led to believe that these threats must be confronted militarily, with the future of the nation at stake.

Things are actually much more mundane than that. Take Iran, for example. To listen to the warmongers, you’d think we’re days away from hearing air raid signals over Washington and Tel Aviv. But the truth is that, even if Iran has decided to pursue a nuclear weapons program – something which has yet to be determined, and which the intelligence community officially regards as aspirational – they would need up to six years to create but one nuclear device. I know John McCain wants desperately to pull the trigger on Iran, but he wants to shoot an unarmed man, and they cannot be armed, at least in a nuclear capacity, until 2016, and that assumes that they actually want to endure international opprobrium and create a weapon. And they are not doing that now.

Lt Gen Ronald Burgess, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz nuclear plant were producing low-enriched uranium and were not yet being used to produce the more highly-enriched uranium needed for weapons.

Then there’s the strategy of continued occupation and war in Afghanistan, where we are told that continued pressure on Al Qaeda, through Predator drone strikes, keeps us safe at home by degrading their organization. Except the evidence shows otherwise:

There’s no way of answering this question with complete confidence, but it turns out there are some relevant and little-known data. They were compiled by Jenna Jordan of the University of Chicago, who published her findings last year in the journal Security Studies. She studied 298 attempts, from 1945 through 2004, to weaken or eliminate terrorist groups through “leadership decapitation” — eliminating people in senior positions.

Her work suggests that decapitation doesn’t lower the life expectancy of the decapitated groups — and, if anything, may have the opposite effect.

Consistent with the earlier data on organizational type, Decapitation is more effective against ideological organizations than religious organizations (see Table 10). Ideological organizations are more likely to fall apart than religious groups whether or not decapitation is taken into consideration. However, across all types of organizations, groups whose leaders have been targeted have a lower rate of decline.

In particular, religious terrorist organizations regenerate pretty quickly, and senior leadership gets replaced. Yet we’re often told that we must keep up “the fight” in Afghanistan to break up terrorist groups. That justifies a buildup of forces as well as the airstrikes. And it may be counter-productive.

Few people in our political leadership think strategically about national security threats, with the proper amount of perspective, such as Russ Feingold here:

The U.S. cannot continue to jump from one perceived “central front in the war on terror” to the next, nor should we invest our resources this way. Al Qaeda, its affiliates and sympathizers will continue to look for new safe havens in places like Yemen, Somalia, North Africa and elsewhere around the globe. Rather than investing a disproportionate amount of our resources into Afghanistan, where al Qaeda now has a limited presence, we should transition to a more sustainable counter-terrorism approach for the region and shift resources to more aggressively pursue al Qaeda’s global network. Ending al Qaeda’s safe haven in Pakistan remains a top priority, but a massive military presence in Afghanistan won’t accomplish this, and could actually contribute to further destabilization of Pakistan.

Rather than spending $100 billion in Afghanistan in one year, primarily on military operations, we should provide assistance to the people of Afghanistan to fight corruption and support the emergence of more responsive and capable government institutions that can address socioeconomic and political issues feeding instability. And we must retain a capability for targeted counterterrorism efforts, consistent with a strategy to fight al Qaeda around the world.

Presidents often have an agenda for national security and foreign policy, and they arrange the threats accordingly. But these arrangements often do not coincide with reality.