Five Years Later

From an article of the same title in The Week, September 15, 2006:

...let's not overreact to the threat, said James Fallows in The Atlantic Monthly. Despite ominous talk of mushroom clouds in U.S. cities, it's highly unlikely that terrorists could build or buy a nuke and smuggle it into the country. That leaves terrorists with one means of inflicting major damage on the superpower: Baiting us into foolishly damaging our own interests. The Bush administration has fallen into this trap, by invading Iraq, killing Muslim civilians, and playing into al Qaida's narrative. Portraying the war as an epic clash of civilizations only feeds the terrorists' false grandiosity - and drives Muslim moderates into the extremists' hands. Terrorists may yet again strike on U.S. soil, but the reality is that we've essentially won the war. The sooner we recognize this, the sooner our policies will be motivated by strategic self-interest, instead of by terror.