Are We Safe Yet?

	Paul R. Pillar Paul R. Pillar is on the faculty of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. He is a retired intelligence officer who served as deputy chief of the counterterrorist center at the CIA and as National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005.
	Fawaz A. Gerges Fawaz A. Gerges is the Christian A. Johnson Chair in International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and the author of Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy and The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global.
	Jessica Stern Jessica Stern is Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and the author of Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill.
	James Fallows James Fallows is National Correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. His most recent book is Blind Into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq.
	John Mueller John Mueller is professor of political science at Ohio State University and the author most recently of The Remnants of War. His next book, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them, will be published by Free Press in November.

Round 1: September 7, 2006

Paul R. Pillar

EVEN HYPED THREATS CAN BE REAL

Terrorism has always been less about physical damage than about fear and the responses fear provokes. John Mueller has thus performed a service by pointing out how American responses to terrorist attacks can cause more damage than the attacks themselves and how one of the most powerful counterterrorist tools is tempering fear by putting the damage terrorism can cause into proper perspective. He provides a further service by reminding readers that there are other important values, such as civil liberties, at stake in the debate over counterterrorism policy.

Mueller shows courage in swimming so directly against the tide of commentary on this subject. Although he does not specifically predict there will be no more serious attacks on the United States, once such an attack occurs, some will undoubtedly castigate him for having been foolishly myopic. After any disaster, those who had been screaming that the sky is falling tend to get credit while those who had expressed a more temperate outlook tend to get criticized, regardless of whether the latter's analysis was better reasoned and more valid.

And some officials have unquestionably hyped the terrorist threat to the United States, as Mueller charges. A lot of the problem stems from the Herculean task the Bush administration set for itself of justifying the war-turned-quagmire in Iraq, and the couching of that justification in terms of a "war on terror." Poll numbers showing terrorism as the only remaining issue on which an increasingly unpopular president enjoys an edge over political opponents provide a powerful incentive for the administration to talk the issue up rather than down. And others outside government may also be guilty of exaggeration, including some in consultancies, academia, and the chattering class who have been part of the counterterrorist cottage industries that have sprung up after 9/11.

Nevertheless, just as paranoids can have real enemies, so too can a hyped threat be real -- as this particular threat is. There are sound explanations for the absence of major terrorist attacks in the United States over the past five years that are quite consistent with there being a serious threat that could manifest itself in such an attack tomorrow. Mueller attempts to dismiss several of those explanations by arguing that each one, by itself, is incapable of accounting for the absence of follow-on attacks. But each explanation may provide part of the reason for that absence, and considering several such explanations together should leave us unsurprised that the United States has not suffered a new attack even in the presence of a continued threat.

Yes, the enhanced homeland security measures cannot thwart all possible terrorist plots, but they have made many of them more difficult and probably have had a broader deterrent effect. Yes, Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan did not remove the wherewithal for all jihadists worldwide to prepare new plots, but it did deal a significant blow to al Qaeda and made it appreciably more difficult for bin Laden to direct terrorist operations. And so forth.

Even some of Mueller's own arguments about the jihadists' being well on their way to the trash heap of history are hardly reassuring when placed in context. There has indeed been a welcome backlash against jihadist terrorism in some parts of the Muslim world, but the same Pew survey results that showed evidence of such a backlash in Jordan also showed bin Laden's continued and even growing stature in other countries -- such as Nigeria, where a clear majority of Muslims now express at least some confidence in him. And it is true that 9/11 was an act of desperation, in the sense that the jihadists had earlier failed to foment revolutions in the countries of most interest to them. But that is exactly why turning their fire against the United States -- bin Laden's strategic stroke of genius -- was, and still is, so attractive to them.

Regardless of the actual level of jihadist strength overseas, one of the main reasons U.S. leaders will continue to have to give high priority to counterterrorism is that most Americans, unfortunately, do not view terrorism in the rational way John Mueller does. If they did, the United States would be not only a less stressed-out society but also a less attractive target for foreign terrorists. But most Americans will almost certainly continue to place far more emphasis on deaths due to terrorism than on drownings in bathtubs or the like -- and they will expect their leaders to formulate policy accordingly.

Fawaz Gerges

A NUISANCE, NOT A STRATEGIC THREAT

It is true that al Qaeda remains highly dangerous and its senior surviving leaders still want to strike inside the United States. But five years after 9/11, the organization does not seem capable of carrying out its repeated threats to do so, as John Mueller convincingly argues.

Far being a breakthrough for al Qaeda, 9/11 was a disaster for it. Transnationalist jihadists such as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are now isolated, even within the Muslim world and among Islamists themselves. The balance of forces has shifted dramatically against global jihadists in favor of local ones and mainstream Islamists who are struggling, often against great odds and under enormous pressures, to accommodate themselves to gradual social and political change in their societies. Al Qaeda may dominate American thoughts and headlines, but its members constitute a tiny minority with much less power than is commonly believed.

The primary goal of the modern jihadist movement is and always has been the destruction of the secular political and social order in the activists' home countries and its replacement with authentic Islamic states. Over the last decade, however, the jihadists have fought bitterly among themselves, following the campaign launched by bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to hijack the movement and change its direction from attacking al-Adou al-Qareeb, the "near enemy" (Muslim "apostates") to attacking al-Adou al-Baeed, the "far enemy" (the United States and its allies).

By taking on the United States -- responsible, in its eyes, for maintaining the grim status quo in the Arab world -- al Qaeda wanted to achieve two goals: ridding Muslim countries of Western cultural and political influences and American military presence, and destabilizing the countries' existing governments and ruling elites. 9/11 was bin Laden's attempt to turn the wheels of political fortune in his favor, by proving at one bold stroke that he and his brethren now represented the vanguard of the umma, the global Muslim community.

Their gamble did not pay off. The vast majority -- at least 95% -- of local jihadists did not join al Qaeda. When the United States invaded Afghanistan, the organization thus found itself facing the brunt of American power almost alone, with the help of only a modest trickle of recruits rather than a wave of seasoned jihadists and fresh volunteers. Instead of expressing solidarity with their besieged and entrapped associates on the Afghan-Pakistani border, prominent jihadist figures openly condemned al Qaeda for exacerbating the problems facing the movement elsewhere. They viewed 9/11 as a catastrophic blunder.

Jihadists are now engaged in a bitter quarrel. Instead of closing ranks against "the enemies of Islam," as bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had hoped, 9/11 destroyed the possibility of local and international jihadists working effectively together -- with the global wing of the movement being the real loser, for it desperately needs loyal allies and revolutionary legitimacy.

The social forces in the Muslim world now arrayed against al Qaeda range from former militant Islamists to mainstream Islamists to leftists and nationalists. Fault lines have even emerged within the bin Laden network itself. The multiple internal conflicts among jihadists call into question the functioning of the jihadist enterprise as a whole, and it is this more than anything else, I would argue, that has been the decisive factor in undermining al Qaeda's operational ability to wage war against the United States.

Unfortunately, this intra-Islamist tug-of-war has hardly been noticed in the West in general and in the United States in particular. U.S. policymakers have focused on al Qaeda's sleeper cells and sympathizers, saying little about all the other forces that could have joined al Qaeda but have not. This explains why the Bush administration wrongly portrays al Qaeda as a fundamental strategic threat to the U.S. homeland, rather than the dangerous nuisance it now is.

Contrary to the received wisdom in the United States, few activists and ordinary Muslims have embraced al Qaeda's global cause. Some may empathize with al Qaeda's grievances against the international order, particularly U.S. foreign policy, but they are unwilling to commit to war or fight on bin Laden's behalf.

The way forward now is not through a declaration of global war against an unconventional, paramilitary foe with little or no social base of support, nor through the re-embrace of traditional regional dictators. In fact, those are exactly the things bin Laden and his cohorts had hoped the United States would do.

If Washington understood the internal political and ideological dynamics of the Muslim world better, it would have second thoughts about militarizing the war on terror, thus causing further turmoil abroad and playing into al Qaeda's hands. It would also recognize that increasing the organization's internal encirclement is the most effective means of nailing its coffin shut.

Jessica Stern

ATTACKS IN U.S. AREN'T THE ONLY CONCERN

John Mueller has written a compelling essay that makes a number of important points. He is correct that since 9/11, Bush administration officials have issued a near-constant barrage of overly dire assessments about the catastrophic threat Americans face from terrorism. Mueller is right to question both the accuracy of these statements and their motivation. And he is right about there having been no successful terrorist strikes against the American homeland since 9/11.

I have four main problems with his argument, however. First, in evaluating the terrorist threat, we need to be concerned about not just the strikes that terrorists have managed to carry out, but also those they might be preparing or plotting. As Mueller suggests, we should indeed be skeptical consumers of the government's claims regarding sleeper cells and thwarted plots. But his claim that there are no or almost no terrorists within the United States is based on no sounder informational basis that the opposite claims of government officials.

Second, we need to be concerned about terrorist strikes around the globe, not just in the United States -- and the picture there is not reassuring. The most accurate and up-to-date figures for international terrorist incidents make it clear that such attacks have risen every year since 2001, and have increased sharply in the three years since the United States invaded Iraq. The most recent State Department report on the subject includes attacks in Iraq, which previous reports had largely excluded and which inflates the numbers somewhat. But even leaving Iraq out of the picture, it would be hard to defend the view that terrorism has been vanquished. And data collected by the private organization MIPT show a similar upward trend.

Third, al Qaeda is interested in more than simply killing Americans in American cities. Bin Laden has described his goal as bringing America into conflict with Muslims along "a large-scale front" which it cannot contain and al Qaeda strategists report that they want to expand what they call the "jihadist current," eroding American power and prestige and separating the United States from its allies. So a proper evaluation of the terrorist threat should consider events on these fronts as well.

To achieve the organization's multiple objectives, for example, Abu Bakr Naji, an al Qaeda strategist, advocates provoking America into direct military intervention in the Islamic world. [#1] And it is certainly the case that the foray into Iraq, which bin Laden takes credit for provoking, has restricted the possibilities for U.S. actions elsewhere while leading to carnage that the terrorists have been able to highlight to their advantage.

Finally, while the U.S. approach to the war on terrorism has been principally military, the enemy has been fighting a war of ideas. When I first started interviewing members of bin Laden's international Islamic front in the late 1990s, only zealots and terrorists found the jihadist idea appealing. In the last few years, however, I have been interviewing Muslim youth in Europe, and it is clear that jihad has now become a "cool" way to express dissatisfaction with the status quo, even for new converts to Islam. Most of the youth attracted to the jihadist idea will never become terrorists. But only a few of them need to in order for the danger to be quite real in a variety of ways, particularly if American policy plays into their hands.

Footnote #1: See Abu Bakr Naji, "The Management of Savagery," an al Qaeda strategy manual translated by William McCants, available at http://www.ctc.usma.edu/naji.asp.

James Fallows

ACT AS IF MUELLER IS RIGHT

The most important quality of John Mueller's article is its bravery. It takes little courage to warn that bad things might happen (as all the people Mueller cites at the start of his article have done). If you're wrong, everyone is happy. Moreover, since you can always say that the crisis hasn't happened yet, it's very hard for a gloomy prediction to be proved incorrect. But to claim that a certain fear or threat is exaggerated is to subject oneself to disproof -- it's a "falsifiable hypothesis," in scientific terms -- and, worse, to blame and ridicule if the nightmare you said probably wouldn't happen does.

But beyond Mueller's personal daring in sticking out his neck this way, the piece is important for bravery of a different sort. I see it (and the larger argument in Mueller's new book, plus complementary work by Ian Lustick and Benjamin Friedman) as arguing that the United States should grow up in its approach to the terrorist threat. I am affected by my own experience this spring and summer interviewing a variety of terrorism experts for an article in the September issue of the Atlantic Monthly. I'm agnostic on the specific claim Mueller makes in this piece about the absence of terrorists in America. But I contend that the United States would be better off acting as if he were right, and running the risk that he turns out to be wrong, than the reverse -- which is what it is doing now.

Great nations face great risks. That's life. Through its history, the United States endured early decades in which its very survival was in question, and then a horrific war over the preservation of the Union. What it suffered five years ago on 9/11 was terrible and unprecedented and paradigm-changing. But it does not mean, as current political discourse seems to assume, that we need to live in fear and assume the worst forever.

Although Mueller does not stress this point, I have been convinced by my own reporting that political violence inside the United States initiated by Muslims is more or less inevitable, someday. It should be expected because it has happened elsewhere in the world and because America has endured political violence throughout its history: think lynchings and riots throughout Reconstruction, or the Oklahoma City bombing.

Obviously, as much as possible should be done to deter, contain, and reduce this source of violence, as with other foreseeable dangers. The sensible steps toward this end have been spelled out many times, including by some of my fellow panelists. They include intensified efforts to harass and capture leaders of al Qaeda; intensified efforts to split Islamic extremists from the majority of the world's Muslims (rather than unifying them, through "with us or against us" rhetoric); targeted police and surveillance work, such as the efforts that allowed British police to penetrate the latest airline-bombing conspiracy; and the continuation of America's basically good record of assimilating Arab and Muslim immigrants.

Indeed, the only point on which I really disagree with Mueller is his claim that the Muslim communities in the United States and Britain are equally well assimilated. I have not reported on this subject in the United Kingdom myself, but everything I have heard suggests that many native-born British Muslims feel more estranged from their society than is typical for counterparts in the United States.

The list of sensible steps never included invading Iraq.

But Americans do not need to behave as if this is the worst threat the country has ever faced, because it is not. Nor does it have to be approached through an open-ended state of "war." I propose a version of Pascal's wager: Should the United States act as if Mueller were right and then, despite its best efforts, be attacked, that would be terrible and tragic -- just as it is tragic every day in America 100 people die in car crashes and 50 are murdered. But acting as if he were wrong and continuing to distort the country's domestic politics and international relations out of excessive fear would be even worse.

Round 2: September 11, 2006

Paul R. Pillar

COUNTERTERRORISM GIVES, IRAQ TAKES AWAY

Most scorecards for the "war on terror" reflect too narrow a viewpoint, particularly in focusing only on the five years since the 9/11 attacks. Terrorism is a centuries-old tactic, and the specific form of Sunni Salafi jihadism that caught the world's attention that day had been endangering the United States since the early 1990s. Well before 9/11, moreover, the United States was using most of the counterterrorism tools now involved in the "war," including intelligence gathering, criminal prosecutions, diplomatic pressure, money-tracking, renditions of individual terrorists, and even military force -- albeit with fewer resources and less public support back then.

A group of Salafi jihadists attempted to topple the towers of the World Trade Center in February 1993, intent on killing tens of thousands of people. Their technique was not as successful as that of their successors, but their ideology and deadly purpose were the same. Yet one seldom heard -- or hears even now -- searching questions about why there wasn't another attack in the years following that bombing (and a companion plot, rolled up four months later, to attack other landmarks in New York City). This inconsistency reflects the tendency of our attention and worries to track past casualty totals rather than underlying threats.

Five years is a short time for jihadists who think in terms of epochal struggles, the rise and fall of civilizations, and rewards in an afterlife. Westerners, having a much shorter perspective these days, tend to overanalyze the implications of year-to-year or even month-to-month patterns in terrorist behavior. The absence of attacks during a period that for the terrorist is a blink of a historical eyelash can set off debates in Washington about whether the leaders at Jihad Central have been crippled or are working on something really big. In fact, the patterns may reflect simply the happenstance of operational opportunities, including the skills of the next aspiring martyr to walk through the door. There is no Jihad Central, moreover, and such jihadist terrorism as does occur is usually not the execution of anyone's master plan but instead the collective product of many different individuals, cells, and groups in what is an increasingly decentralized movement.

The history of previous extremist movements gives reason for hope that the current jihadist phenomenon may have already run much of its course. And as Fawaz Gerges notes, jihadists are beset both by serious divisions among themselves and by challenges from other streams of activist opinion within the Muslim world. But that still leaves a stretch of course yet to be run, and possibly much damage and suffering yet be inflicted. The task of U.S. policy now is to find ways to limit the risks and possible damage without jettisoning our other values, using all available tools to counter the most dangerous jihadists while not saying or doing things that prolong the life of their movement and ideology.

The United States has made substantial progress on these fronts in the last five years, including increasing attention to homeland security and eroding al Qaeda's infrastructure. But it has failed on the last count, by embracing policies such as the invasion of Iraq that have invigorated the jihadists and played directly into their warped portrayal of a civilizational struggle. President Bush and other supporters of the invasion and occupation have argued that jihadist terrorism preceded the war, but this strikes down only the straw man that the war is the sole cause of the terrorism; it does not negate the clear indications that the war is an inspiration, propaganda bonanza, recruiting poster, networking opportunity, and training ground for the jihadists. And other U.S. policies have also contributed to the perception of American antipathy toward the Muslim world, such as Washington's opposition to an early cease-fire in the fighting in Lebanon this past summer.

Much of what the United States has done during the last five years under the label of counterterrorism has been worthwhile. But unfortunately it has negated those accomplishments with policies in other areas that have affected the level of terrorist threat. And as a result, Americans are probably more endangered today than they were on 9/12.

Fawaz Gerges

PROMISING HEAVEN, DELIVERING DUST

In my last post I argued that al Qaeda has not delivered on its repeated threats to strike inside the United States partly because it is hemorrhaging and encircled within the Islamist movement and the Muslim world more generally. Cracks have emerged even within the bin Laden network itself, with the case of Abu al-Walid al-Masri being a good example.

Before 9/11, Abu al-Walid had been a leading theoretician of the organization and participated in its most significant decisions. But he broke with bin Laden over the attacks, becoming one of the most senior of the Arab Afghans to part company and take his grievances public (through a newsletter and articles in the Arabic press).

Abu al-Walid had worked closely with both Mullah Omar and bin Laden, and in his writings he paints a dark portrait of the latter as an autocrat, running al Qaeda as he might a tribal fiefdom. Bin Laden had thought that the United States would retreat after two or three engagements, basing his assessment on the U.S. Marines "fleeing" Lebanon in 1983 and on what happened in Somalia in the 1990s, when U.S. forces left in a "shameful disarray and indecorous haste." But after September 11, Abu al-Walid notes, matters "took an opposite turn compared to what bin Laden had imagined. Instead of buckling under his three painful blows, America retaliated and destroyed both the Taliban and Al Qaeda."

Abu al-Walid tells us that bin Laden entangled the Taliban in regional and international conflicts against its will and brought about the destruction of the Islamic emirate; Afghanistan was lost because of bin Laden's reckless conduct culminating in the attacks on the United States.

al Qaeda members knew better than to challenge bin Laden, he says. "You are the emir, do as you please!" he reports them as telling their leader. But that attitude turned out to be not only wrong but also dangerous: "It encourages recklessness and causes disorganization, characteristics that are unsuitable for this existential battle in which we confront the greatest force in the world, U.S.A."

By stifling internal debate and underestimating the enemy, Abu al-Walid concludes, bin Laden was personally responsible for the defeat, rendering Al Qaeda's final years in Afghanistan "a tragic example of an Islamic movement managed by a catastrophic leadership. Everyone knew that [bin Laden] was leading them to the abyss and even leading the entire country to utter destruction, but they continued to bend to his will and take his orders with suicidal submission."

The importance of Abu al-Walid's withering criticism -- which is echoed by a number of other jihadists -- is its public acknowledgment of disarray and defeat. Many leading jihadists have concluded that the war is lost and that bin Laden and his hawkish aides promised heaven and delivered dust. In short, for the bin Laden network the war within has been more lethal than the war waged against it by the United States.

Jessica Stern

THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME

James Fallows is correct that John Mueller is courageous in taking on the prevailing wisdom and putting forward a falsifiable hypothesis. Those who publicly underestimate threats are far more vulnerable than those who exaggerate them, even though this is not particularly fair, given that threat exaggeration can carry large costs too. And Mueller is certainly correct, as I noted in my first post, in pointing out that some people have exaggerated the current terrorism threat deliberately.

Still, even if global jihadists might not pose a threat to the existence of the United States, I think it is premature to call them simply a "nuisance," as Fawaz Gerges suggests. Paul Pillar has it exactly right: The terrorism threat may be exaggerated these days, but even a hyped threat can be real.

Specialists on the perception of risk tell us that people tend to underestimate greatly the probability of unusual threats, but overestimate the probability of dangers that are easy to imagine or recall. Most of us who were alive on 9/11 have difficulty forgetting the shock of what we saw -- passenger jets flying directly into the buildings, people jumping from the windows, some of them holding hands as they leaped to their deaths just before the towers fell. With such images in the collective mind's eye, people are prone to overreact and imagine the worst.

Long-time students of terrorism are quite familiar with fluctuating public attitudes toward the subject. Before 9/11 we were seen as eccentrics, rambling on obsessively about a supposedly non-existent threat. Afterwards, we were seen as Cassandras, with our worries suddenly taken very seriously indeed. Despite the shift in popular attitudes, however, the professionals' views didn't change all that much. Before, they thought the probability of a major attack was real but relatively low, and they think the same thing now.

The one area where all the Roundtable participants seem to agree is that terrorists aim to make us react in ways that threaten our security, in essence doing their work for them. This is sometimes referred to as an "auto-immune response" to terrorism: They attack us, we attack ourselves in response. The jihadists behind 9/11 set out to provoke us into taking actions that would reduce our security, prestige, and moral authority, and measured against that objective, they did pretty well. One can point this out, however, without making light of the continuing threats that the jihadists pose.

James Fallows

WHAT WOULD BOGEY DO?

In the first round of posts the participants all disagreed somewhat with one another and with John Mueller. If the discussion went on at greater length, I'm sure we would place slightly different emphases on the urgency of the challenges the United States has to deal with and the next steps it should take. But when compared with the general sweep of public, political, and media portrayals of the ongoing threat of terrorist attack, all of us, along with Mueller, are essentially on the same side. Everyone here has agreed that politicians have routinely made the threat seem more dire and immediate than it is and that the media have generally played along.

Why should this be? Why, of all the cultures that have had to deal with terrorist attacks over the last decade, should the United States now seem most fearful?

It would be easiest, if most depressing, if one could simply conclude that this is how Americans are. But in fact, Americans have historically prized just the opposite sort of demeanor: people who keep their cool and refuse to be rattled, even under stress.

This is the country that produced Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, and Jimmy Stewart. When he was able to speak after being shot, the first thing Ronald Reagan said was not: "Let's lock down much of Washington to keep this from happening ever again." He said, of course, "Honey, I forgot to duck." Even those who didn't think Reagan spoke for their politics thought he spoke for their culture. And Rudolph Giuliani's God-like status in the few months after 9/11 was based largely on his calm, concerned, but non-panicky sense of competence.

I think a better explanation involves two forms of market failure, one involving politicians and the other the media. The political market failure is that over the last five years, it has been far more effective for politicians to appeal to sky-is-falling fears than to try to calm them. The Republicans have been the greater offenders, because they have been in office, because this plays into their traditional strength on national security, and because it suits the nature of a President who feels he found his historic mission on 9/11 and a Vice President who portrays the world in the direst of terms. But Democrats have often tried to counter by being even more alarmist, emphasizing hidden weak points Republicans have not yet addressed.

The media market failure is more obvious. For reasons that predate 9/11 and that distort public discussion in ways that go far beyond terrorism, the media have made it hard to think calmly about the threat and the proper response. Here the greatest offenders are the 24-hour news channels, because of the all-or-nothing nature of their business model. The audience for cable news soars when there is a crisis, and it is thus in these channels' interest to turn everything into a crisis. A war will serve, but if there isn't one at the moment, whatever is at hand will have to do.

Thus a missing Washington intern, Chandra Levy, received national-emergency treatment in the weeks before 9/11, and was essentially never heard of afterwards. And thus the young woman missing in Aruba has served as a place-holder emergency between the capture of Saddam Hussein and the killing of al-Zarqawi. In this system, it is almost impossible for TV not to overplay any hint of a security threat.

The problems I have described are structural, but I suspect the answer will depend on individual political leadership. When someone can actually play the role of a Churchill -- or a Gary Cooper, or even a Rick Blaine at his bar in Casablanca -- Americans will be able to be themselves again.

John Mueller

JOHN MUELLER RESPONDS

I thank the roundtable responders for their thoughtful comments, and I would like at the outset to defend my article against the charge that it exhibits "bravery," "daring" and "courage" (or "foolhardiness", as less charitable commentators might have put it.)

Having spent some time in Washington, I am quite familiar with the nuances of the CYA process, and was careful to embed in the article the posterior-preserving statement that "none of this is to deny that more terrorist attacks on the United States are still possible." The point of the article is to suggest that the threat of international terrorism to the United States may well have been much inflated, not that it doesn't exist or that it isn't real. That proposition is not terminally refuted if some fanatical nut somewhere shoots up a bus, bank, or beauty salon while shouting "God is great!" any more than the suggestion that exceedingly few lottery ticket buyers will win is refuted when one of them happens to do so. Terrorism has always existed and always will -- political assassination, for example, is a form of terrorism that likely goes back to the dawn of the human race. However, as James Fallows and Paul Pillar suggest, many people will likely take an incident to be refutation, and I guess I'll have to live with that.

I agree with Pillar that enhanced security measures may have been effective in making it more difficult for terrorists to function and, as he and Fawaz Gerges have written elsewhere, I credit much of this to effective internationally coordinated policing overseas (something that, further, suggests that the inability here to come up with much of anything is due to something other than policing incompetence). However, since a terrorist act only requires one or two determined guys with a gun or explosive (or in the case of forest fires, a match), and since the United States contains an essentially infinite number of attractive targets, the fact that no attacks have been carried out in the country may indicate that the terrorists are far less capable and dedicated than popularly assumed. Israel, of course, has a far more extensive and layered security apparatus, yet terrorist attacks still take place there.

I have tried to deal with the "are we safer?" concern elsewhere. As Jessica Stern points out, there may have been something of an increase in terrorist activity around the world since 2001 and particularly since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. Much of this seems to be due to changes in methods of counting, however -- the latest edition of the State Department's tally says its results are not comparable to earlier ones because some domestic terrorism and insurgent activity has been included. If the insurgency in Iraq is considered to be terrorism, all sorts of previous civil war activity will have to be re labeled including the mayhem that led to tens of thousands of deaths during the catastrophic civil war in Algeria in the 1990s.

More to the point, Americans are not worried about an insurgency, but rather about destructive, attacks within the country. Working with and updating data published in Anthony Cordesman's The Challenge of Biological Terrorism, I calculate that the number of deaths inflicted since 9/11 by al Qaeda and al Qaeda types across the globe outside of war zones has been around 800 or 900. Moreover, in a large number of instances the "connection" of these murderous terrorists to al Qaeda is atmospheric at most. Those deaths are tragic, but the numbers do not suggest that, as many commentators (not including any of those on this roundtable) have repeatedly argued, the United States is up against a diabolically capable enemy, that its survival is at stake, that the threat it confronts is existential or apocalyptic, that it has somehow managed to become engaged in World War III, or that civilizations are cosmically clashing.

The key consideration is not whether more people hate the United States or its foreign policy. Rather it is whether the haters are more likely to attack the far enemy, the United States, itself. As the roundtable contribution by Gerges suggests, that appears not to be the case.

All the commentators in various ways and to different degrees suggest that the costs of terrorism very often emerge from the fear and overreaction it inspires in its victims. I strongly agree. Although my argument may, as Pillar suggests, verge dangerously on the "rational" (another charge I guess I'll have to live with), I hope it helps at least a bit to refocus the discussion.