Terror still a threat five years after 9/11

THE ISSUE Today is the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks by al-Qaida on America.

TERRORISM remains a serious threat to the United States five years after the attacks by al-Qaida, although no subsequent attacks have been successful and few have been attempted. The government has yet to complete vital security measures at its ports and borders, and both the United States and al-Qaida may have been distracted by Iraq, a battlefield of America's own making.

President Bush insists that "America is safer" than it was five years ago "because we've taken action to protect the homeland." However, confidence in the Department of Homeland Security has sunk since its inept response to Hurricane Katrina last year. Americans don't necessarily feel safer.

The United States has the British to thank for the detection of a plot to blow up nine airplanes heading to America from London and its arrest of two dozen people. Serious assaults have occurred in Spain, Britain and elsewhere since 9/11 but none in the United States.

Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein considered Osama bin Laden to be an adversary, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report released Friday. The Bush administration mistakenly suspected ties between Iraq and al-Qaida and considered the invasion to be part of its war against terrorism.

Iraq has become part of that worldwide conflict only because the U.S. invasion turned it into a magnet for terrorists. "Osama bin Laden has called Iraq central to the war on terror," Bush said last week, "and if we lose, if this young democracy fails, the enemy will be emboldened."

Instead, the evidence suggests that "fears of the omnipotent terrorist ... may have been overblown, the threat presented within the United States by al-Qaida greatly exaggerated," John Mueller, professor of political science at Ohio State University, asserts in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, republished by the Star-Bulletin in yesterday's Insight section. We hope Mueller is right, but such beliefs should not replace security measures needed in case he is wrong.