Reexamining the war on terror
New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, left, speaks at a news conference with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on Saturday, Oct. 27, 2007, at DHS headquarters in Washington. Homeland Security officials struck a deal with New York Saturday to create new driver's licenses that will be more secure for U.S. citizens but also still allow undocumented aliens to get state licenses. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf) Credit: AP Photo/Kevin Wolf
Is America winning the war on terror? People are pessimistic: A recent survey by Rasmussen Reports found confidence on this front at its lowest ebb in more than four years.
At first blush, that's a puzzling result. Ours is a country that has defied every expectation by avoiding any signicant attack from al-Qaida since 9/11. Yet just 32 percent of likely voters think we are "winning."
That may reflect pessimism about Afghanistan; only 19 percent expect the situation there to improve in the next six months. It may also reflect declining support for the decision to use force in Libya, which fell by 6 percentage points, to 39 percent, from two weeks ago.
But voters are right to be pessimistic even absent these factors, since a war on terror can never be truly won. The survey implies what is only sensible: that we should drop the idea of a war on terror altogether.
What we are really fighting are those who would use terror against us. Someday al-Qaida will vanish, but the weapon of terrorism, which is as old as human conflict, will no doubt persist.
Terrorism is more pernicious than many threats, since it exploits and undermines the very basis of an open society. Yet it has no chance of defeating us, even if we sometimes seem bent on defeating ourselves with fright. Indeed, it pales next to such mundane threats as smoking and auto crashes.
Terrorism, in fact, is easy to defeat. We need only keep it in perspective to discover that we've already won.
