If We Fail to Cower in Terror, the Terrorists Win

Or so Victor Davis Hanson says:

In short, six years of quiet at home since 9/11 have fooled some into thinking that terrorists pose little danger here — or that we may be doing far too much rather than too little to stop such killers. No matter that this past week a jihadist plot to destroy U.S. facilities in Germany was thwarted.

Others make the mistake of endlessly refighting the past six years — who let al Qaeda grow?; who “lost” Osama bin Laden?; who fouled up postwar Iraq? — instead of concentrating on the storm ahead.

Hanson is shocked that people are actually questioning the methods of the Global War on Eastasia Oceania Terror; clearly, if they understood the direness of the situation, they would complacently accept any and all actions taken by the administration using terrorism as a pretext. Because, being insufficiently complacent about Bush means you're way too complacent about people who want to take a blowtorch to the Brooklyn Bridge.

Or something.

Before 2001, the excuse for American complacence and in-fighting was naivete. But what will be the reason for the next successful strike against us by the jihadists?

Administration incompetence? Just a thought.

I know we'll probably never get to a point at which we can talk rationally about the statistically tiny threat posed by loosely-organized fractious groups composed largely of self-aggrandizing incompetent wannabes. In the alternative, though, maybe we could get hysterical about things that are really killing Americans.

Maybe we could ascribe the 30,000 or so workplace deaths since 9/11 to "employer terrorism". Or the 180,000 handgun fatalities to "NRA terrorism". Maybe we could call the 24,000 pedestrians slaughtered since 9/11 victims of "vehicular terrorism".

Nahhh...we'd probably just end up declaring war on bicyclists.