Five Years Later

last updated 8 January 2015

'œIt is the most blessed nonevent in recent American history,' said RichÂ Lowry in National Review. In the weeks after Sept. 11, we all braced ourselves for the worst. With frightening ease, al Qaida fanatics had killed nearly 3,000 civilians in New York and Washington, D.C. Surely, they would strike again. So with gas masks and duct tape and foreboding deepened by numerous terror 'œalerts,' we waited and waited… for nothing. Terrorists have struck in London, Bali, and elsewhere, and another attack on the U.S. could certainly occur at any time. Still, you'd think the fanatics would have found some way to 'œslaughter Americans on their home soil' by now, said Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune. The question is, Why haven't they?

The most plausible explanation is that they can't, said Jacob Weisberg in Slate.com. Despite the misadventure in Iraq, the 'œferociousÂ crackdown' unleashed by Sept. 11 has effectively 'œwrecked al Qaida as a centralized organization.' Most of the group's leaders are now dead, captured, or in hiding; unable to travel, send money, or communicate with one another. All that's left is small, 'œself-starter' terror cells with few resources and little expertise. Homeland security remains a work in progress, said the Los Angeles Times in an editorial, but it's no longer easy for foreign terrorists to stroll in undetected. Agencies such as the FBI and CIA are now sharing vital intelligence. Heightened vigilance has yielded better airport security, luggage screening, and other basic measures. And in the end, 'œpure luck' may have kept several plots from succeeding.

Perhaps it's time to re-evaluate the al Qaida threat, said Youssef IbrahimÂ in The New York Sun. The organization may be capable of occasional bombing strikes on Western civilians, but it's a small, grubby group of fanatics blinded by its own ideology. These few thousand men do not pose 'œan existential danger to the world.' When they fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, they 'œlost every battle they ever engaged in.' Their previous bombings—the World Trade Center in 1993, U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, the USS Cole in 2000—were 'œmore pugnacious than crippling.' Only the grotesquely successful assault of Sept. 11 made al Qaida seem like a menace to Western civilization itself. It's now clear that it is not, said John Tierney in The New York Times. Compared with the Nazis, who had the world's most powerful military, and the Soviet Union, which had the ability to incinerate every square inch of the U.S. in a matter of minutes, al Qaida's terrorists are 'œa minor problem.' It may sound flip to say so, but the fact is that more Americans have died in bathtubs over the past five years than have died in al Qaida attacks.