...if you want it.
Radley Balko (Cato): "James Fallows begins in the cover story of this month's Atlantic Monthly, with what I think is the single most important article written since Sept. 11. Fallows spoke with 60 experts in foreign policy, security, national defense, and terrorism, from all political ideologies.
We should take heart in what he found: Al Qaeda is a shadow of what it once was. The group's central organization has been dismantled. Its main sources of funding have been castrated. Its leaders are on the run, and their ability to organize and communicate severely disrupted. Yes, the loose-knit groups of cells that remain can still pull off attacks, and can still kill significant numbers of people. But so can just about any nut in America with a cause and some determination.
The only real threat Al Qaeda still poses, Fallows concludes, is how it can provoke us. "[Al Qaeda's] hopes for fundamentally harming the United States now rest less on what it can do itself than on what it can trick, tempt, or goad us into doing," Fallows writes. "Its destiny is no longer in its own hands."
This is the one thing — the most important thing — our elected leaders and public officials need to learn. Because it's the only cache the terrorists still have. Americans need to realize that we, Americans, determine the success of failure of future terrorists attacks and attempted attacks. If the goal of terrorists, by definition, is to induce panic, fear, and to disrupt our way of life, the best way to defuse them is to refuse to panic, to resist irrational fears, and to retain the open society and civil liberties that make us who we are."
We are our own worst enemy at this point, but we can make it right. We're not where I wanted us to be 5 years down the line, not by a long shot, but we have made real progress against Al Qaeda. If we can stop terrorizing ourselves, we can lay claim to victory.
By Mark Clayton, The Christian Science Monitor:
