Five years on

IN THE DAYS AND WEEKS AFTER Sept. 11, 2001, anguished Americans asked “Why do they hate us?” and “How could this have happened?” As the nation prepares to mark the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks, the question preoccupying Americans is different: “Why haven’t we been attacked again?”

One answer, of course, is that we have -- just not on U.S. soil. And the question could be rendered horribly irrelevant tomorrow if Al Qaeda or its sinister soul mates manage to penetrate the defenses erected over the last five years. But there really can be no single answer to the question. A certain humility becomes those who try to explain why the U.S. has been spared an attack in the last five years. After all, no less an authority than Tom Ridge, then secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, predicted in 2002 that another terrorist attack was “not a question of if, but a question of when.”

Security measures adopted since 9/11 -- such as more secure airplane cockpits and more thorough baggage screening -- are certainly part of the explanation, as is a generally heightened state of vigilance. But pure luck also may be a factor.

That said, President Bush is correct when he says, as he did last week, that “one reason the terrorists have not succeeded is because of the hard work of thousands of dedicated men and women in our government, who have toiled day and night, along with our allies, to stop the enemy from carrying out their plans.” The president also is right to point to changes in the law -- most of them enacted with bipartisan support -- to break down walls between the FBI and the CIA and to extend to counter-terrorism investigations techniques that already had been authorized in criminal investigations.

More debatable is the proposition that the U.S. is safer because of the reconfiguring of various agencies into a massive Department of Homeland Security, or the creation of a new position of director of national intelligence. A substantive commitment to greater vigilance is a more important consequence of 9/11 than changes in governmental flow charts.

Some initiatives undertaken after 9/11 are clearly efficacious; others are still a question mark, and still others amount to an overreaction. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has suggested that its anti-terrorist initiatives are all of a piece. Because the “world has changed” since 9/11, it asserts, no opposition to its policies can be tolerated. According to this view, amplified in the squawk box of partisan rhetoric, it is obstructionist or even disloyal to question particular post-9/11 policies, be they particular provisions of the Patriot Act, interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay or the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

Testifying before Congress in December 2001, then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft suggested that critics of some of the administration’s terrorist proposals might be giving “ammunition to America’s enemies.” Almost five years later, House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio complained that the Supreme Court was granting “special privileges to terrorists” when it ruled that Bush could not impanel tribunals to try suspected terrorists without congressional approval.

Often ignored in this partisan cut-and-thrust is the fact that Democrats have supported many of the president’s initiatives and that Republicans -- notably Sen. John McCain of Arizona -- have been critical of others. It’s a sign of national strength that Congress and the courts have refused to rubber-stamp every initiative advertised by the administration as being essential to the war on terror. But it’s equally encouraging that the broad lines of a post-9/11 policy have been embraced by both parties.

A final thought: Although it was appropriate for Bush to focus on how the governmental response to 9/11 has minimized the threat of further attacks, another factor may be the very openness and mobility of American society that the 9/11 conspirators were able to exploit because of inadequate airport security and sluggish surveillance.

In Britain, where authorities last month announced that they had frustrated a plot to bomb U.S.-bound planes in midair, the suspects had been raised in Muslim communities that were cut off culturally from mainstream British society. Whether this separation fostered their extremism remains to be seen. But it is a welcome fact that Muslims in the United States are not an isolated minority.

Ridge may yet be proved a prophet for saying four years ago that the question was when, not if, the U.S. would be attacked again. But the fact that another 9/11 hasn’t happened is at least in part a tribute to the way Americans, and the American political system, have responded.