[F]ive years of evidence suggests that the terrorist threat within the United States is much more modest than was feared after 9/11, when it seemed quite possible that there were terrorist sleeper cells in American cities, armed with �weapons of mass destruction� and awaiting orders to attack�As time has passed without a new attack, the voices of skeptics who believe that 9/11 was more a fluke than a harbinger are beginning to be heard.The GOP, needless to say, has lacked much incentive over the last five years to dampen the sense of danger and crisis stemming from the terrorist threat. But doing so has proven to be distinctly off-message for the Democrats as well, given their relentless (and, to be sure, accurate) emphasis on the Bush administration's shortchanging of homeland security measures and the counterproductive folly of the Iraq War (it being a "distraction" from the truly important and necessary war against al-Qaeda, etc.).
For a while after 9-11 it was quite understandable to think that a genuinely new and pervasive threat was on the scene, and that further spectacular attacks were in store relatively soon. In the ensuing years, not only the fact that there hasn't been a repeat attack on American soil (excepting the unsolved anthrax attacks) but also the eventual publication of serious empirical research on the relevant issues -- Mark Sageman's profiles of the actual members of transnational terrorist networks, Robert Pape's work on suicide bombers, etc. -- have, I think, lent some ample support for the suspicion that the terrorist threat to America, while obviously real, is simply less extensive and acute and more manageable then we had thought. (John Mueller is the go-to person to read for the strong version (PDF) of this claim.) One impression you get from a lot of this work is that, contrary to the image of poor Muslim masses flooding into madrassas and emerging as motivated al-Qaeda recruits that we all came to internalize from the first round of post-9-11 commentary, the actual number of individuals who comprise transnational terrorist networks and possess the will and capacity to carry out major, long-planned attacks on American soil turns out to be, simply, very small. Islamic terrorists lack the numbers and means that most of us originally assumed they had to execute sustained and repeated mass-casualty attacks.
It's politically dicey, of course, to put forth this argument, and substantively one can certainly veer too far in the direction of complacency (particularly given the scandalous failure so far to secure loose nuclear materials around the world, which affords terrorists their only means of posing a real existential threat against anyone, however unlikely it may be). In that light, James Fallows' Atlantic cover story about "declaring victory" puts the case for scaling back the fear and war-like mobilization around fighting terrorism in as palatable and persuasive a manner as I've seen. In that piece he quotes David Kilcullen comparing the contemporary jihadist threat to anarchist terrorism at the turn of the last century -- a really important, overlooked parallel. Then, as now, there was a small number of people committed to carrying out serious and high-profile acts of political violence in the West. Then, as now (I believe), the extent of the direct threat they posed was actually smaller and more fleeting than feared. And then, as now, the really serious and high-stakes danger came from how states responded to the inevitable violent acts that would be successfully carried out from time to time.
--Sam Rosenfeld