Congress and the press corps are in a tizzy because President Bush had warning, before September 11, that Osama Bin Laden was planning hijackings. In retrospect, the warning should have been taken more seriously. But that’s all the more reason to take seriously the current warnings.

There is the warning that Iran is building a nuclear weapon and medium-range missiles for use against Israel and Europe. There is the warning that Iraq retains its stocks of chemical and biological weapons and that the dictator in Baghdad would not be afraid to use them against America or against the Iraqi people. There is the warning of cyberwarfare attacks on America’s information infrastructure. There is the warning that it is possible to smuggle weapons past the security guards at major American airports.

There is one particularly important warning, that America, having failed to build and deploy a missile defense, is vulnerable to penetration by an enemy missile. While these warnings have been sounded and ignored, Communist North Korea has been scrambling to put offensive missiles in place. When and if any of these warnings comes to fruition in a deadly attack, the headlines will no doubt speak of advance warning.

The thing to focus on is who is arguing that we should go slow in funding the Pentagon and the covert services, who is second-guessing the Justice Department and the Attorney General as they scramble to meet these warnings. At the moment, the Democrats make it sound like they want to make political hay out of the fact that President Bush had a warning about Al Qaeda. The real question is what they’re going to do right now.