ALMOST EVERY DAY since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan nearly five years ago, some politician or someone in the press – most frequently a critic of the Bush administration – has asked the question: Are we safer today than we were before 9/11?

The question pops up most frequently whenever any news, good or bad, regarding the so-called "war on terror," the war in Iraq, or a terrorist plot or attack anywhere in the world hits the front page. It has been asked, of course, on every anniversary of 9/11, and never with greater frequency than with the approaching fifth anniversary.

The answers are predictable – and highly partisan.

Bush supporters say: Of course we are safer. We dismantled the Taliban, decimated the Al Qaeda leadership, toppled Saddam and tightened homeland security. There has not been a repeat attack. There have been many attempts, but so far they have been thwarted.

Still, they caution, it is a dangerous world and the enemy is still out to get us.

Bush critics, on the other hand, claim the administration’s “cowboy” approach to foreign policy has made more enemies for the United States and facilitated terrorists in their recruiting efforts.

Yet they don’t admit that the terrorists are or ever were “out to get us.” Rather, the terrorists just want us to quit being bullies and leave them alone.

More succinctly put, Bush partisans say: “Are we safer? Yes, but not really.” Anti-Bush partisans say: “Are we safer? No, because it was Bush who made us unsafe.”

So which one is right?

Actually, neither.

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The Bush critics’ contention that administration policy is the cause of the problem is blatantly false. It just ain’t so. Those who believe it are dangerously naive; those who know better and still make the claim are hazardously pernicious if not outright seditious.

The Bush supporters, on the other hand, make some very good points, but their conclusion is self-contradictory. Yet the fallacy is not in the answer but in the question itself.

“Are we safer today?” sounds straightforward enough at first blush, and would seem to invite a simple yes-or-no answer. But the question cannot even be addressed until we have answered another question: How safe were we before?

Clearly, we were not as safe on September 10, 2001, as must of us supposed. Nor, for that matter, were we as safe on November 6, 2000 (the day before George W. Bush was elected president) as we supposed. The danger facing America at the hands of Al Qaeda and other militant Islamofascist terrorists predated the Bush election by many years.

Five years after 9/11, with no additional major terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, many Americans feel safer than they did the day after those attacks – if for no other reason than that the attacks have not been repeated. But the danger still exists and is, in fact, far greater than most Americans realize.

Actually, “Are we safer today?” is not the right question to ask, even though it may seem to be the obvious one. A more important question is: How safe will we be tomorrow? And the answer to that really critical question is yet to be determined. It will depend upon whether we recognize the dangers we face and what we choose to do about them.

It is important to understand that doing what seems to keep us safer today will not necessarily make us safer in the long run. A case in point: Poland took what it thought was the safe path when it signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1934; five years later, Poland was the first country Hitler invaded at the start of World War II.

Sometimes it is necessary to face, rather than avoid, an immediate danger in order to assure a safer future.

Allow me one medical metaphor and one military analogy to illustrate the point.

Suppose you have – but do not know you have – a life-threatening malignant brain tumor. How safe do you feel? How safe are you? As long as you are unaware of the tumor, your perception will differ from reality. Let us suppose that you then suffer a severe seizure. Your doctor examines you and diagnoses the tumor. He recommends immediate surgery. It appears that the tumor was detected in time, so that with surgery, the prognostication is good, he says. The odds are in your favor. With surgery, you may live many more years; without it, you have only a few months. How safe are you now? You are in mortal danger, of course, but you are in no greater danger than you were the day before. The only differences are that you are now aware of the danger and that you can now make a choice that may mitigate or eliminate that danger.

Let us suppose that you elect to have surgery, and shortly thereafter you are in the operating theater, under the care of a team of skilled medical professionals. An incision is made and the operation begins.

Let us suppose that the surgery was expected to last four hours, but when the doctors open you up they realize the tumor was more extensive than they thought, and it may take as much as nine hours. Still, they are confident that they can remove the tumor and save your life.

Let us now introduce an absurdity into this otherwise very realistic scenario. Suppose the hospital administrator decides that the operation is taking too long and costing too much and orders the surgical team to discontinue the uncompleted surgery. They walk away and leave you lying open on the operating table. Now, suddenly, you are in great danger and will probably die where you lay. Yet it would not be the election to undergo surgery that killed you but a failure to finish the job.

Now the second analogy. Going back to December 6, 1941, the day before Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, many Americans felt quite safe, convinced that the oceans that isolated us from Europe and Asia would allow us to sit out a war some felt was none of our affair. A day later, the country was disabused of that notion and with near-unanimous resolve, we went on the offensive, determined to defeat both Japanese imperialism and Nazi expansionism overseas before our enemies had a chance to invade our homeland.

With the U.S. entry into World War II, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, sailors and airmen who had no great concern for their immediate safety at home shipped out for the war zones in Europe and the Pacific. Were they safer than before they left home? Of course not. Were the Allied forces that left the east coast of England bound for France on June 6, 1944, safer than they were the day before the Normandy Invasion began? No, they put themselves in harm’s way, and many thousands died that day. In all, more than 400,000 American military personnel were killed over the course of the war.

But because America and the Allied forces finished the job in both Europe and the Pacific, in the end the world (or at least our part of the world) became a safer place.

It is worth noting that the Axis powers (mainly Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and to some degree Fascist Italy) killed over 35 million civilians during World War II, yet just 11,200 American civilians died, and most of those not on U.S. soil. Without a doubt, if the United States had waited for German and Japanese assaults on the American mainland before getting into the fight, the casualty count – both military and civilian – would have been much higher, very possibly in the millions as in Poland, for example.

Suppose on that first day on the beach at Normandy, or perhaps two years earlier when the United States suffered defeats in the Philippines, President Roosevelt had decided that we were taking too many casualties and called the troops home. How safe would we have been then?

It is much the same today. The current threat to the United States and the free world in general from Islamofascist terrorists and their allies is at least as serious as that posed by Germany and Japan three generations ago. The United States, under the leadership of President George W. Bush, recognized that threat and undertook a war against terrorism, vowing that the offensive “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated” and warning that “any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”

Unfortunately, defining the enemy as "terrorism" -- which is a tactic, not an entity or an ideology -- has made it difficult for us to focus on just who and what it is we have to defeat in order to proclaim victory. Now, nearly five years into the war on terror, and more than three years since the Iraq phase of that war was launched, America’s resolve to win seems to have dissipated. We set out to excise a malignant tumor that threatens to destroy us. We will be safer than we were five years ago only if we finish the job. But if we walk away with the patient still on the operating table, we may well risk a future more dangerous than if we had never begun.

Source: www.PerspicacityPress.com. Copyright © 2006 Rand Green Communications.
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