The Redhunter

We know how this is spun by the left; if there are no terrorist attacks, then BushCo exaggerated the threat from the start so as to scare the American people into voting for him again and enriching Halliburton et al, but if there had been another 9-11 style attack then Bush is incompetent and isn't doing enough to protect us.

The reality is that al-Qaeda would have if they could have executed large-scale attacks on the US. The reason none of these have come to fruition is that we've been busy frustrating their efforts. Unlike traditional wars, however, this one is mostly conducted behind-the-scenes. For an excellent book which describes some of these operations, see Richard Miniter's Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush is Winning the War on Terror

Geraghty uses the recent arrests of 17 terrorist subjects in Canada to bolster his case that al-Qaeda "is a nearly impotent operation, a shadow of its former self." The lessons he takes from the arrests are

* The view that al-Qaeda and its like-minded adherents are not motivated by any political cause that a Westerner could understand - gripes about Israel, or "economic exploitation", or foreign troops on Saudi soil, or Iraq. They just want to kill people who are different from them.

* It reinforces the worldview that a lenient asylum program for foreigners is a massive security risk. That minorities need to be assimilated into the society as a whole.

* The list of names reaffirms the argument that the threat of Islamist terrorism comes primarily from one group of people.

* The use of electronic and e-mail monitoring by Canadian authorities reinforces the argument that extensive electronic eavesdropping programs are necessary to intercept threats.

The suspects in Canada are, I believe, said to be "inspired" by al-Qaeda, but not directly affiliated with them. This is important because it shows that 1) al-Qaeda is not as strong as it once was, but that 2) the globalist jihad movement is alive and well.

As Geraghty points out,

The names of the suspects that have been released: Fahim Ahmad, Zakaria Amara, Asad Ansari, Shareef Abdelhaleen, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, Mohammed Dirie, Yasim Abdi Mohamed, Amin Mohamed Durrani, Steven Vikash Chand alias Abdul Shakur, Ahmad Mustafa Ghany and Saad Khalid.

The people on that list all have something in common, and it isn't that they're all stamp collectors. Many in the press, however, couldn't bring themselves to point this out.

When the press insists upon saying that the suspects represent a “broad strata” when 4 out of the 11 of the released names have “abdul/abdel/abdi” in them, 2 Ahmads, 2 Saads, and 3 Mohammeds, it sends one of two messages to readers. The first is “we think you’re stupid and can’t figure out the common thread these suspects have in common”; the second is that “we in the media are stupid and can’t figure out the common thread these suspects have in common."

Well, it's not that they think we're stupid, it's that they're so caught up in the ideology of political correctness that they can't bring themselves to point out the obvious. Heaven forbid that CAIR should object.

Another point to be taken from the arrest of the suspects in Canada is the disparate nature of these jihadist terrorist cells. They're not all going to be directly tied to al-Qaeda, but will rather be inspired by it to take action on their own. A recent Washington Post story profiled one Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, a "Spanish-Syrian citizen tied to al-Qaeda", who is described as being the "Architect of New War on the West", and that his "Writings Lay Out Post-9/11 Strategy of Isolated Cells Joined in Jihad". Read the whole thing.

So we're not winning the War on Terror yet, we're certainly winning the war against al-Qaeda. Yes it is unfortunate that we haven't captured Osama bin Laden yet, but no that war in Iraq isn't what has prevented us from doing so. This does not mean, however, that the danger is past.