I was out late last night, so bear with me, here — Michael Tackett and Jeff Zeleny write in today’s Chicago Tribune—

FBI agents in an undercover sting operation arrested seven terrorism suspects in Miami on Thursday who allegedly were plotting to attack the Sears Tower in Chicago, the FBI headquarters in Miami and other U.S. buildings, officials said.

The suspects had “aspirations” but “no means” to attack the Sears Tower or other buildings, a senior federal law-enforcement source said.

The men were all Muslims who thought they were plotting “in conjunction with Al Qaeda” but they really were dealing with law-enforcement undercover agents, one law-enforcement official told The Miami Herald.

The men, who told neighbors in the Liberty City area of Miami that they were starting a children’s karate class at a warehouse, had been plotting for an undetermined amount of time, but their scheme was thwarted well before any attack could be carried out.

“They talked about belonging to an Islamic army. They wanted to raise an army in the U.S.,” a second senior law-enforcement official said Thursday. “But they didn’t have the means to do this.”

“There was no threat at all,” the senior federal law-enforcement source said, referring to the Sears Tower. Chicago police said the city is not on increased alert despite the news.

And later in the article …

The men, who had been subjects of an undercover federal investigation, were apprehended without incident in an adjacent Miami neighborhood.

“There was no imminent danger to the community,” said Judy Orihuela, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Miami. “Everybody is in custody who was part of the group. We’ve been conducting the investigation and we know that it’s been dismantled.” …

… Sears Tower officials would not comment directly on the arrests. But a spokesman said that no plan to attack the building ever had been carried out. Tenants said they had not been notified about the plot.

“Law enforcement continues to tell us that they have never found evidence of a credible terrorism threat against Sears Tower that has gone beyond criminal discussions,” Sears Tower managing director Barbara Carley said in a statement.

No big bleeping deal, in other words. Of course, if you’d only seen the headlines (Fox News: “Seven Nabbed in Miami on Terror Charges in Plot to Hit Sears Tower“) you might have gotten a different impression of what went on.

In one of her most brilliants posts yet, Michelle Malkin calls the suspects “black Muslim radicals” and provides us with an overview of recent terrorist threats coming from black Muslim radicals, going back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and including the Beltway snipers and black Muslim inmates in Folsom Prison. She even takes a swipe at “the old school black Muslim thugs (and Jesse Jackson pals) of the Chicago-based El Rukn.”

And then she says … get ready for this … “Bob Owens catches the Democratic Underground already playing the race card.”

Awesome. You don’t have to parody Malkin. She does it herself.

Still, if indeed we are swimming in terrorist threats here at home … why are we in Iraq, again?

Ellen Goodman writes in today’s Boston Globe (emphasis added):

… over the past two weeks as the House and Senate debated exit and no-exit strategies, there emerged a phrase in the rhetorical war that has not fallen on deaf ears. It’s the assertion that we are fighting the terrorists there so we won’t have to fight them here. As the president said in the State of the Union address, in the West Point graduation speech, in the surprise visit to Baghdad, “we will stay on the offensive against the terrorists, fighting them abroad so we do not have to face them here at home.”

In the midst of the mutual taunting and sound biting, this still resonates with the American people. So it’s time to ask whether we are indeed fighting terrorists in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them in the New York subway. If so, what does it mean? What does it portend?

From the get-go, the Bush administration framed the war in Iraq as self-defense, as part of the war on terror. In fact, Iraq was never on the State Department’s dance card of terrorist strongholds. The attempt to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11 was as phony as the assertion of weapons of mass destruction. By no stretch of Dick Cheney’s imagination was Iraq a front line on the war on terror. But it is now.

Over three years, it’s become the recruiting ground, the favorite destination for terrorists who take their place alongside insurgents and civil warriors. No sooner is Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi killed than a claim comes in that the brutal torture and murder of two American soldiers is the work of his successor.

If Iraq is the neighborhood in which terrorists have chosen to fight America, are we now sending soldiers to keep them in that neighborhood? Are we now sending sons, daughters, husbands, wives to be the designated terrorist attractions? If not cannon fodder, are they I.E.D. fodder?

This week at a news conference, The Wall Street Journal’s David Rogers, a Vietnam veteran, challenged the House majority leader. “In Vietnam, they used to put us out in these fire support bases and hope we would get attacked. Is that what you are doing?” he asked. “You are putting people in Iraq and hoping they get attacked so you can bring out the terrorists?” Has it come to this?

Wasn’t that the “flypaper theory” all along? And shouldn’t we put the righties on the spot to explain, if all these black illegal immigrant Muslim radicals are swarming about the country anyway, doesn’t that mean we’re failing to fulfill the mission in Iraq?

Goodman adds, “This administration had no post-Saddam strategy for Iraq. Now it seems they have no post-Iraq strategy for the war on terror.”

Yesterday, Dan Froomkin discussed Karl Rove’s exploitation of Iraq for political purposes. The plan is for Republicans to deride any Democratic plans to withdraw or redeploy troops in Iraq as a “cut and run.” It seems Karl has no post-Iraq strategy for winning elections, either.