From Matt Bai’s article on Rudy Giuliani yesterday in the New York Times Magazine:
There is a growing, though not unanimous, feeling in liberal policy circles that remaking the nation’s entire foreign policy around terrorism is an overreaction to what is, essentially, a serious but manageable threat. As one senior Democratic policy aide put it to me recently, the terrorist attacks that claimed some 3,000 innocent American lives were indescribably tragic, but if you had gone to sleep on September 10, 2001, and woken up sometime in 2006, surely you would have thought, to hear the political rhetoric, that several American cities had been wiped off the map. In this view, Al Qaeda is not a defining ideological adversary so much as a stateless, lethal criminal enterprise . . . .
If you had gone to sleep on September 10, 2001 for six years, you would have missed not only 9/11 but other “tragic” events in Afghanistan, Denmark, East Timor, Egypt, England, France, Gaza, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Morocco, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Scotland, Somalia, Spain, Sudan, Thailand, Turkey and other places, conducted by groups making it clear they consider themselves “ideological adversaries” — and trying not only to pull off many more events like the one you missed on 9/11, but also to take over an existing nuclear nation (Pakistan) while receiving the support of another nation (Iran) hell-bent on becoming one.
After you woke up, it would take you a long time to get through the list of Islamist terror attacks in the first half of 2007. You probably would not think that excessive wiretapping of international calls relating to a manageable criminal enterprise was the principal problem. You would probably not be "gaily insouciant." You might think, for reasons we’ll explore tomorrow, that you were in a new World War.