James Fallows has an essay in The Atlantic about America's position in the larger fight against al Qaeda and other Islamic terror groups.  You have to be an Atlantic subscriber to get the piece on their website, but if you aren't it's worth paying for a copy of the magazine.  Based on his own sense of the situation and interviews with dozens of experts, Fallows concludes that things are going reasonably well.  Al Qaeda as an effective organization is pretty much gone, the capacity of terrorists to launch large-scale attacks within the US is limited, Arab and Muslim Americans are not disaffected and open to the lure of extremism like they are in France, Spain and Britain.

Fallow believes we should "declare victory," on the grounds that al Qaeda has been crushed.  I don't think we can declare victory against al Qaeda while bin Laden is still alive.  The extent to which he's cut off from any role in planning terror attacks is irrelevant.  If we declare victory while he's still alive it will ring hollow in the Arab and Muslim worlds.  It will also ring hollow in the United States.  The man orchestrated the deadliest massacre of Americans in history, and leveled a good portion of downtown Manhattan.  If he's still alive we haven't "won."

But that's a separate issue from whether we'd be better off acknowledging our successes and ratcheting down the tension, rather than continually speaking and acting as if we're locked in a never-ending struggle against an enemy with the capacity to destroy us.  Fallows points out that, while it's impossible to stop every terrorist attack, it also not possible for terrorism to destroy the United States.  What terrorists can do is goad the United States into destroying (or at least grievously harming) itself.  We're more likely to do that if every foreign policy decision is taken in an atmosphere of perpetual crisis.

This isn't a failing unique to Republicans, conservatives, or supporters of the war in Iraq (I'm not sure of the extent to which those three groups even overlap these days, but that's another story).  Democrats, liberals and opponents of the war also tend to portray the threat from al Qaeda and its allies as existential.  I think part of this is political.  President Bush says he's battling an existential threat.  Why argue that he isn't?  It's much better politics to say he's failing in the fight and making the country less safe.  But I think, for the most part, that the war mentality is sincere across the American political spectrum.  Fallows points out all the ways in which that mentality is self-defeating; rather than re-state all his articles I'll just recommend the piece.  I thought it was an encouraging perspective, one that is optimistic without ignoring very real dangers and trade-offs.

One benefit of brining the rhetoric of war and national destruction under control is that it will make it easier to weigh costs and benefits rationally.  Really, what wouldn't we do to save the United States?  The country needs to make difficult decisions about Iraq, the power of the executive branch and plenty of other issues.  Always envisioning the downside as "the country is destroyed" or "New York is incinerated" makes it difficult if not impossible to look at these issues rationally.  Of course, nuclear terrorism needs to be taken seriously as a threat.  But, as Fallows points out, defaulting to the most aggressive possible response may not make us any safer.

 

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