That doesn't mean the legendary Arab Street, or its counterparts in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia and the Far East, is more willing to rise up against insufficiently Islamic overlords and install a Taliban-style theocracy. On that level, bin Laden's crew has mostly failed. For all the sympathies they've mustered in parts of the Muslim world—in sections of Afghanistan, pilgrims visit the graves of Al Qaeda fighters for their reputed healing powers—the Revolution is clearly behind schedule.
The trouble is, there's a difference between being unable to convert a fifth of the world to your cause and being unable to muster further operations against the West. Al Qaeda is more a loose network than a single corporate entity; in the annals of officially designated enemies, it is more akin to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy than to the Communist Party. Furthermore, its operations do not necessarily require a lot of manpower.
We also know that its defeat in Afghanistan has not been matched by similar losses in the Philippines and elsewhere—and for that matter, that the fall of the Taliban has in no sense meant that Afghanistan itself is subdued. The new "coalition government" has little authority outside the cities, and within them it is contending again with fundamentalists hostile to Western liberties.
It is also true that governments in both the West and the Muslim world have arrested terrorist conspirators, and that there are surely covert operations afoot whose details we do not know. But to the extent that we can fathom what's actually going on outside our borders, we don't seem to have gotten very far.
Protecting the Homefront
If the situation abroad is troubling, the situation at home—i.e., where the aforementioned English-speaking resident of North America doesn't have to rely on other people for all his information—is downright disturbing. When Cheney, Mueller, and the others declared that further terrorist attacks were inevitable, they may have been exaggerating—perhaps Al Qaeda will get its hands on a weapon of mass destruction, and perhaps it won't. But they were basically right.
This is not because the terrorists are especially wily fellows. (We are speaking, after all, of a group whose recruits apparently thought it wise, while preparing to hijack four airplanes, to brag about their plans to some lapdancers in a Florida strip bar.) It is because, on almost every level, the "security" measures passed in the last year have been, at best, time-wasting jokes—and at worst, dangerous diversions.
The proposed reorganization of American intelligence has floundered in bureaucratic warfare, with entrenched agencies more interested in protecting turf than protecting American lives. Part of me can't blame them for this—after all, they're merely emulating the behavior on display at the top. The Bush administration's ass-covering response to questions about its failure to foresee the attacks are matched only by the behavior of Democrats so bent on scoring political points that they won't extend their investigations to the Clinton years. A healthy institution learns from its errors; an unhealthy one hushes them up.
The worst offender is probably the FBI, a bureau so wary of embarrassment yet immune to shame that its best agents have found themselves going to the media rather than their superiors with news of how leads that might have stopped 9/11 were not pursued.
But a special honorable mention should be granted to the new Department of Homeland Security, which immediately attempted to exempt itself from whistleblower protections. It's hardly unusual for a bureaucracy to put its own health above its stated mission, but it's rare for one to indicate its priorities so early in its life.
Meanwhile, the new federalized airport security force turns out to be the exact same airport security force as before, with a different signature on its paychecks. Humiliating searches and nutty confiscation policies have disarmed law-abiding citizens (not to mention G.I. Joe dolls) without giving us any reason to believe committed terrorists could not smuggle real arms aboard a plane. (Undercover agents have managed to slip fake weapons past security in almost a quarter of their tests since 9/11.)
If security at airports is overly intrusive, security elsewhere is schizoid. Guards are everywhere, to the point where undercover cops are stationed at Rosh Hashona services, yet any remotely creative person can conceive of ways to do serious damage, real or symbolic, in cities across the country. If one-man terrorist incidents like the July 4 shooting at Los Angeles International Airport have been rare, most of the credit should not go to the police, or even to the impressive acts of civilian self-defense that brought down Flight 93 and later stopped a would-be shoe-bomber. It should go to the fact that so few people in the United States are willing to engage in mass murder to begin with.
Everything Else
It's impossible, of course, to reduce this conflict to breaking up Al Qaeda and defending the homefront. Almost everyone with an agenda has tried to tack it onto this war, some more successfully than others. If on September 10, 2001, you felt the U.S. should attack Iraq, then on September 12 you discovered that the War on Terror required a "regime change" in that country. If on September 10, 2001, you favored compulsory "national service," then on September 12 you discovered that the War on Terror demanded no less. If on September 10, 2001, you favored federal subsidies to the underpants industry, you probably managed to find a terror-related rationale for that by the end of November.
But such projects do not advance the core mission of protecting Americans against terrorist assaults. In some cases, like the pending war with Iraq, they may actually subvert that goal.
America is the world's dominant military power. It can overthrow governments in Afghanistan and Iraq without much fear of defeat. What it can't do is protect its citizens against every maniac with a beef against us, or browbeat Arabs willing to sacrifice their own lives into accepting a region laid out on America's terms. I'm all for capturing the thugs behind the 9/11 attacks and feeding them their own testicles, and I'm all for destroying the organizations that would carry out further assaults. But a year after those murderers killed nearly 3,000 people in a few quick blows, Americans are scarcely safer now than they were this same morning, 365 days ago.
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