What War on Terrorism?

Mark Stein has an interesting commentary in today's Orange County Register. Steyn reminds us that this week's six-year anniversary of 9/11 will be the first time since the attacks that remembrances will fall on a Tuesday morning, the day of the week we were hit by the Islamists.

But to reflect on the state of American popular perception, goes Steyn, you'd hardly know there's a war against terrorism going on:

Six years on, most Americans are now pretty certain what they'll wake up to in the morning: There'll be a thwarted terrorist plot somewhere or other – last week, it was Germany. Occasionally, one will succeed somewhere or other, on the far horizon – in Bali, Istanbul, Madrid, London. But not many folks expect to switch on the TV this Tuesday morning, as they did that Tuesday morning, and see smoke billowing from Atlanta or Phoenix or Seattle. During the IRA's 30-year campaign, the British grew accustomed (perhaps too easily accustomed) to waking up to the news either of some prominent person's assassination or that a couple of grandmas and some schoolkids had been blown apart in a shopping center. It was a terrorist war in which terrorism was almost routine. But, in the six years since President Bush declared that America was in a "war on terror," there has been in America no terrorism.

In theory, the administration ought to derive a political benefit from this: The president has "kept America safe." But, in practice, the placidity of the domestic front diminishes the chosen rationale of the conflict: if a "war on terror" has no terror, who says there's a war at all? That's the argument of the left – that it's all a racket cooked up by the Bushitlerburton fascists to impose on America a permanent national-security state in which, for dark sinister reasons of his own, Dick Cheney is free to monitor your out-of-state phone calls all day long.

Read the whole thing. Steyn notes that a majority of Americans thinks Bush knew something about the attacks in advance. Indeed, for Steyn, our culture's been taken over by conspiracies of 9/11, rather than cold, hard thinking about the current correlation of forces in international affairs.