Time To Declare Victory In The War On Terror?

I couldn’t disagree more with this line of thinking…

…as we approach the five-year anniversary of Sept. 11, it’s worth noting that we haven’t see another attack of anywhere near he same scope and magnitude of that awful day. Even the bombings in London, Madrid, and Bali, while certainly horrifying and tragic, caused nowhere near the panic, devastation, and sense of doom that gripped the world five years ago.
An emerging group of thinkers, scholars, and security experts have begun to take the provocative position that it’s time for America to declare victory over terrorism. I think they make a convincing case.

I have three problems with this argument:
First, just because we haven’t had another 9/11 in five years doesn’t mean another one won’t happen. Al Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center for the first time in 1993. It took eight years for the group to plan, organize and execute a second attack on that target which, as we’re all aware, resulted in the total destruction of the twin towers. Eight years.
The Islamic fascists may be crazy religious zealots, but they’re not stupid. They are patient, and they have what it takes to develop and organize an attack and then wait years for the perfect moment to execute it.
Second, labeling the bombings in London, Madrid and Bali (not to mention the myriad of terror attacks not mentioned like the hundreds massacred in Beslan) as though they were somehow acceptable because their body counts weren’t as high as 9/11′s is not only foolhardy it is blatantly disgusting. As long as the west is at risk from Islamic terrorism then we have a duty to wage the war on terror.
Third, saying that the war on terror has been won because there hasn’t been another 9/11 is just plain naive. Let’s remember that the anti-terror initiatives we’ve enacted since 9/11 – like NSA call monitoring and terror finance tracking – were instrumental in thwarting the recent British terror plot which many described as possibly being another 9/11. We stopped that plot because we are fighting the war on terror. We stopped it by doing the very things the people making this argument want to stop because we’ve “won.”
Radley Balko (the author of the piece quoted above) wants to declare victory in the war on terror so we can do away with some of the authority the President has been granted to fight terrorism all in the name of civil liberties. The argument he’s using is “there hasn’t been another 9/11 so we’ve won.” Someone should maybe tell Balko that there maybe hasn’t been another 9/11 because the President has broad authority to gather intelligence and wage the war on terror.
As the threat from the middle east grows (see: Iran) not the time to be returning to 9/10 sensibilities.