We are losing.
 
Four years and two wars after the attacks of September 11, 2001, America is heading for a repeat of the events of that day, or perhaps something worse. Against our most dangerous foe, our strategic position is weakening. Inspired by Usama bin Laden’s boldness and outraged by America’s recent actions, more Muslims are sympathizing with the radical Islamists and joining their movement. Individuals who hitherto had no significant ties to radical organizations are enlisting themselves in the struggle and committing acts of violence, sometimes without any support from existing networks. In disparate places around the globe, from Indonesia to the Caucasus and from Pakistan to Western Europe, the jihadist ideology has become the banner under which an array of grievances is being expressed, and often that expression is violent. In many of these regions, local and global grievances are merging into a pervasive hatred of the United States, its allies, and the international order they uphold. Within parts of the Muslim world, social and religious inhibitions on violence are weakening, and the notion is gaining acceptance that an attack on infidels involving weapons of mass destruction would be justified.
 
The United States—and certainly its leadership—appears not to have comprehended the dynamic, ideologically driven insurgency whose heralds were four hijacked commercial jets. Instead of taking a comprehensive view of the phenomenon of radical Islam, only two indicators are used to show the measure of our progress in the war on terror: the number of days since 9/11 in which we have not experienced a second catastrophic attack, and the number of al Qaeda members who have been apprehended or killed. While it is true that bin Laden’s group has been seriously hurt by the capture of many of its leaders and the disruption of many of its cells, the administration’s focus on numbers feeds the widespread belief that the terrorist enemy is finite in quantity and destructible in the near term. The failure to look beyond al Qaeda and to recognize the multiplying forms that the jihadist threat is taking represents a serious failure of vision. We are repeating the errors of the time before 9/11 in believing, first, that what terrorists do abroad has little consequence for national security, and, second, that only states can truly threaten us. Unwittingly, we are clearing the way for the next attack—and those that will come after.
 
Not only are we not attending to a growing threat, we are stoking the fire. America’s invasion of Iraq has turned that long-suffering country into the central theater of the jihadist struggle. We destroyed one of the hated secular dictatorships of the Arab world that jihadists had been unable to dent but left an open field for radicals from outside the country and within to cause havoc. The terrorists have found in Iraq a better sanctuary, training ground, and laboratory than they ever had in Afghanistan. They have also been given what they desire most: American targets in close proximity. They can now demonstrate their valor and resolve to bleed America, and in doing so, to build momentum for their cause. We have slain the chimera of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but we are nourishing the all-too-real dragon of radical Islam.
 
It is unlikely that even in his most feverish reveries, Usama bin Laden could have imagined that America would stumble so badly and wound itself so grievously. By occupying Iraq, the United States has played into the hands of its opponents, affirming the story they have been telling to the Muslim world and adding to their aura as true warriors in defense of Islam. America’s image in the Muslim world has never been more battered, and the jihadist claim that the United States seeks to oppress Muslims has never seemed more plausible—no matter how noble we view our own sacrifices in the liberation of Iraq. There is, as has so often been said, a war of ideas going on, a battle for hearts and minds. Unfortunately, America has wound up on the wrong side.
 
We and our friends are paying a price for these errors. As this is being written, investigators are pursuing leads from the British Isles to Pakistan in connection with the July 7 bombing of three Underground trains in London and a double-decker bus. The attacks, carried out with the al Qaeda hallmark of multiple simultaneous blasts, appear to have been the work of three Britons of Pakistani descent and a Jamaican immigrant who had converted to Islam. It is not clear yet whether, as alleged, they benefited from bomb-making instruction in a jihadist training camp in Pakistan, but that is entirely plausible. Nor do we know what was going through their minds when they planned the incident that killed fifty-six people. But if they are anything like other recent terrorists, then their anger was fired by the presence of Americans, Britons, and others in Iraq. “Our military is confronting the terrorists, along with our allies, in Iraq and Afghanistan so that innocent civilians will not have to confront terrorist violence in Washington or London or anywhere else in the world,” Vice President Dick Cheney said in September 2003.1 It has not turned out that way.
 
We have compounded these mistakes by squandering the chance to build defenses against a new kind of enemy. The successes we have notched against the leadership of al Qaeda have bought us time, but the time has been wasted. When American political leaders wish to show seriousness they first declare war on a problem, then they decree a bureaucratic reorganization. Since 9/11, we seem to be caught in a perpetual loop of reorganizing our homeland security authorities and our intelligence community. The possibility that we need something other than a sweeping organizational fix seldom gets taken seriously. Lawmakers feel any other response would be incommensurate with the original cataclysm, and if they chose such an avenue, they would be showing a lack of seriousness. But while the legislation mandating a great conglomeration of agencies has been enacted, the leadership, vision, and resources to make that “rationalization” effective have been missing. Particularly in the realm of homeland security, the last three years have witnessed an extraordinary amount of wheel-spinning. These were years we could not afford to lose.
 
More disturbing, the signs are growing that the jihadist threat is a diminishing concern for the nation. Despite clear evidence of an increase of jihadist activity abroad, a recent decline in threat reporting against domestic U.S. targets has led Terrance W. Gainer, the chief of the Capitol Police, to remark in May 2005, “The imminence of a threat seems to have diminished. We’re just not as worried as we were a year ago, but we certainly are as vigilant.” This from a man whose officers guard a known al Qaeda target, and who is regularly briefed by the FBI and CIA. John O. Brennan, then acting director of the new National Counterterrorism Center, agreed, saying, “Progress has been made.”2 The declining sense of urgency has been apparent in President George W. Bush’s rhetoric, too. As one observer has noted, Bush mentioned the war on terror or some variant of the phrase more often in the thirty days prior to...