Still Criticizing the War on Terror?

September 10, 2007
Still Criticizing the War on Terror?
By Mark Davis

I won't be at Ground Zero on Tuesday. Nor will most of the crowds of media types who joined me in that neighborhood last year.

We attach big anniversaries to roundish numbers: five, 10, 20, 50 and so on. It will be 2011 before another grand reassessment of the dark day that supposedly changed everything.

I say "supposedly" because what strikes me the most as 9/11's sixth anniversary approaches is how little really has changed.

It changed for a while. For a few precious months stretching into early 2002, our nation's differences really did stop at the water's edge, a concept coined 60 years ago by U.S. Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan.

America's status as a superpower was cemented in the 1940s with victories in a second global war. At that time, Republicans like Mr. Vandenberg and his Democratic colleagues knew that in such a perilous age, politics must be superseded by national interest.

Mr. Vandenberg described an atmosphere that would have been a great boon to post-9/11 America if we were capable of it. "To me," he said, "bipartisan foreign policy means a mutual effort, under our indispensable, two-party system, to unite our official voice at the water's edge so that America speaks with one voice to those who would divide and conquer us and the free world."

Is there anyone who believes such nobility is possible today?

We have not been attacked by al-Qaeda for six years, yet there have been nearly five years of political attacks on every level of our war effort.

Of course, it has been a war pockmarked by many flaws and the attendant debates over strategy. But now we hear debates over withdrawal, which are an enormous boost to an enemy that already seemed exponentially more motivated to win than we are.

But as war debates rage, it is worth measuring where we are on the home front as we observe six years since the day that sparked a new era in world history.

I restrained myself for five years from sharing a belief that the absence of further attacks meant we are doing something right. From 2002 through 2006, I held open the possibility that maybe we were just lucky, or al-Qaeda wasn't as big a deal as we thought, or maybe the terrorists just didn't want to hit us again.

Well, we're not, they are and they do. We are doing something right.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff left me cold a few weeks back by blowing off my suggestion that our borders exist to keep out both terrorists and those seeking to take illegal advantage of America's economy. His tone said "don't bother me with people trying to take our jobs; I'm trying to keep out the next Mohamed Atta."

Greedy soul that I am, I want both. But if it's been hard to get serious about the "economic immigrants" (his term), at least we seem to have made it sufficiently difficult for terrorists to fly that next armada of planes into a major city skyline.

Part of that success is a story told within our borders. At our airports, the Transportation Security Administration makes us do some things that make sense and some things that fill Jay Leno monologues. But I'm not in the mood to sneeze at something that has worked.

The rest of our success story is to the credit of the hundreds of thousands of troops from the U.S. and our allies who have taken the fight straight into the gaping maw of the terrorist world.

Yes, al-Qaeda still exists. Yes, there is still an active insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. That may take a long time to change.

But one question trumps all others. Have we been attacked again on our shores since Sept. 11, 2001? That answer is no, and it is a testament to the honor and sacrifice of all involved in our war effort.

That effort itself is still under constant attack from the portion of America that has grown war-weary. Since we are faced with an enemy that will not tire, one wonders how long we will observe 9/11 anniversaries without a new date arising to share its infamy.

Mark Davis is a columnist for the Dallas Morning News. The Mark Davis Show is heard weekdays nationwide on the ABC Radio Network. His e-mail address is mdavis@wbap.com.