Its interesting that in Barack Obama's first address to a joint session of Congress, there was not any mention about the status of the war on terror.

In fact, references to the war on terror have been missing from Democratic talking points and administration officials. Even the Secretary of Homeland Security, (Janet Napolitano) has been making every effort since Inauguration Day to avoid the phrase.

Indeed, it is becoming clearer with each passing day that the new administration views this country's response to the threat of terrorism as more a legal and police action than a military one. This view is reinforced by the recent action that the President took to close the military camp at Guantanamo Bay which will eventually leave the prosecution of the detainees to the courts and the Department of Justice.

So, the importance of the nations war on terror has seemed to suddenly just disappear. However, questions remain while the answers seem pretty unclear. Can a war the country has fought for the last eight years suddenly just disappear? Did we win the conflict and is it now over? Is all that now remains just the 35 million hits that appear when that four word phrase is typed into a Google search? In political terms, what is really going on here?

To answer that last question first, consider that there is a new national fear for politicians and the mainstream media to exploit. The focus on the current economic crisis has created a national fear greater than the immediate threat of terrorism. As a result, the war on terror at least for now has disappeared.

Unfortunately, American politicians have discovered that the crisis resulting from the federal governments inability to keep us safe from terrorists - either Islamic or financial, can lead to an opportunity to advance a political agenda without transparency in haste. It is the concept of never having to let a good domestic crisis go to political waste.

The conservative rhetoric of Barack Obama as a budget hawk belies the fact that he has just passed an economic stimulus bill that will in the next decade amount to over three trillion dollars of new federal spending. Meanwhile, the Democrats in the House of Representatives, are now preparing an earmark laden budget bill that increases federal spending by another 8% over the next six months.

The federal deficit is exploding from new government programs and in the next few years a major offset will have to come from dramatically slashing the defense budget. The Bush Administration's last defense budget request, committed $647 ( 4.4 of GDP) billion to national defense in fiscal year 2008. That number did not even include the cost estimates of the ongoing operations in the war on terror.

Talking up the economic crisis to spend money on new and existing federal programs while avoiding any discussion about the war on terror is setting the political stage for an attempt to reduce the budget deficit by dramatically reducing the size of spending on national defense. It is a strategy that can only work by avoiding long, foreign military entanglements like Afghanistan and another domestic terrorist attack.

In 2004, George W. Bush said, "After the chaos and carnage of September 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers". Apparently the new presidential administration disagrees and it is why the war on terror is a phrase that is now missing in action. A reduced defense budget will insure that in the future, legal action against terrorists will become a big part of this administration’s homeland security plan.

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