My friend Trish, in her mid-20s, is a knitter. She belongs to several knitting circles, all of which are comprised of Gen Xers. Knitting, apparently, is the new trendy thing to do. She never did get around to telling me what it is she knits. Thongs, probably. The conversation was sidetracked when she said knitting is great for passing time on airplanes. (Trish’s job requires frequent travel.)

“You knit on airplanes?” I was incredulous. “They let you on an airplane with six-inch long steel knitting needles?”

“It’s the strangest thing,” Trish said. “They took a metal comb away from me, but they’ve never said a word about my knitting needles.”

That’s the defense in the war on terror writ small. Writ large, Homeland Defense Chief Tom Ridge barks onto television the Sunday morning after the Democratic National Convention and orders the alert level raised for New York and Washington, DC. In the midst of his announcement, he makes a campaign aside to praise George W. Bush’s handling of the war on terror.

Forty-eight hours later, with the national subject sufficiently changed, it’s admitted that this was all based on three-year-old information. Will Bush-Cheney ’04 reimburse the New York and DC police departments for the overtime accrued during its cute campaign stunt?

Difficult as it might be to agree with Tom Ridge, it’s true there’s a substantial likelihood the U.S. will, in the near future, again be attacked by terrorists. George Bush claims the U.S., under his leadership, is winning the war on terror. John Kerry promises that if we elect him, we’ll have real security and progress in the war on terror.

What if we look at the war on terror from the terrorists’ side? Almost three years ago, al Quaeda was able to deliver the harshest blow America has ever received from an external foe. America counter-attacked almost immediately and the Taliban government was driven from power in Afghanistan. The Taliban-like Islamic fundamentalists on the Afghan-Pakistani border, however, are believed to be sheltering Osama bin Laden. Most of Afghanistan has reverted to the control of narco-warlords, a fine environment for terrorist bases.

Iraq, which once was hostile to Islamic fundamentalists, is now destabilized, wide-open and breeding anti-American militants of several varieties. These militants have adopted the Western tactic of niche marketing and are dismantling Mr. Bush’s coalition county by country and contractor by contractor through kidnappings and executions.

Osama bin Laden’s stature has been raised to something approaching a deity in the Middle East and the number of young men willing to volunteer for suicide martyrdom has increased by an order of magnitude.

Terrorism experts – from our side of the war – say the March bombings in Madrid were carried out not by al Quaeda insiders, but by new cells emerging and taking action with neither training nor direction from Osama and his lieutenants. Which means that if Osama is captured or killed or dies of old age, the war goes on.

So there will probably be a next time for America. An attack on America is the obvious “big time” for the up and coming class of terrorist the Bush bungling has created. Sections of the report of the 9-11 Commission have detailed how vulnerable we are in our ports, our factories, our transportation and energy infrastructures. Those sections have received the kind of inattention paid to knitting needles on airplanes. Mr. Ridge has not seen fit to send machine-gun toting police officers to defend our vulnerable spots. There’s little political mileage to be had guarding a chemical tank farm in New Jersey.

There may well be a next time and we may well be making as many mistakes as last time.

(c) Mark Floegel, 2004