It was shocking, hearing CIA director Michael Hayden tell Tim Russert on Sunday morning that we’re wide open to another 9/11-style terrorist attack. Al-Qaeda, he said, is turning to operatives who “look Western” and “wouldn’t attract your attention if they were going through the customs line at Dulles with you.” These new recruits, he averred, “would be able to come into this country without attracting the kind of attention that others might.”

Let’s see if I understand this correctly: all one has to do in order to get into the U.S. is to “look Western” and not stand out too much in the line at Dulles.

Seven years after 9/11, we’re still just as vulnerable as ever to another devastating blow such as the one Osama bin Laden delivered on that fateful September morning. I’ve often joked that the sheer force of the explosions in New York and Washington tore a hole in the space-time continuum and hurtled us into a Bizarro World alternate universe, where up is down and the laws of reason and logic are similarly inverted. Nothing else explains our present course, our crazed foreign policy, and our utter helplessness in the face of a very real threat to the continental United States.

Four years after the 9/11 Commission issued its recommendations of preventive measures to be taken, the report molders on the shelf, its laundry list of urgent action items not even close to being implemented. One key passage from the report:

“The U.S. border security system should be integrated into a larger network of screening points that includes our transportation system and access to vital facilities, such as nuclear reactors. The president should direct the Department of Homeland Security to lead the effort to design a comprehensive screening system, addressing common problems and setting common standards with system-wide goals in mind. Extending those standards among other governments could dramatically strengthen America and the world’s collective ability to intercept individuals who pose catastrophic threats.”

Our borders are more porous than ever, and not the slightest effort has been made to repair this rather large chink in America’s armor. The commission’s recommendation that we institute “a biometric entry-exit screening system, including a single system for speeding qualified travelers,” has been completely ignored. As the commissioners pointed out,

“No one can hide his or her debt by acquiring a credit card with a slightly different name. Yet today, a terrorist can defeat the link to electronic records by tossing away an old passport and slightly altering the name in the new one.”

That hasn’t changed. Indeed, very little has changed. Instead of building a biometric barrier to terrorism, the Transportation Security Administration is busy strip-searching little old ladies from Kansas and devising new ways to deal with passengers who have body piercings. The Department of Homeland Security is a mess  instead of streamlining the bureaucracy it has merely added on another layer of inefficiency. Homeland Security has never passed a government audit. No, not even once.

Homeland Security funding, instead of going to defend the most likely terrorist targets, is sent to states like Wyoming, which, as Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, noted, gets “5 to 10 times as many homeland security dollars per capita as many high-risk states.” It’s small wonder these funds are distributed according to a predictable political formula instead of addressing the real security needs of a nation at war with a deadly enemy. Yet such vindication of my libertarian views on the nature and purpose of government does nothing to reassure me  or to lessen the very real (and increasing) danger.

The United States has chosen to fight an offensive war, but this has boomeranged, and badly. The Iraq war not only diverts us from our task of rooting out al-Qaeda, it also empowers and enables the terrorists in their efforts to wreak havoc on the American mainland.

Bin Laden’s legions are more numerous and better strategically placed than they were before 9/11: they’re not only in Afghanistan, they’ve also infiltrated “liberated” Iraq and entered Pakistan. In the latter location they’ve carved out a safe haven, where they continue to plot their war against America  while Gen. Pervez Musharraf, our chosen strongman, and the recipient of billions in U.S. aid, gets weak in the knees in the face of bin Laden’s tribal protectors.

Furthermore  and more importantly  we’re losing the ideological battle against the jihadists, whose view of the U.S. as the main enemy of Islam is seemingly confirmed by U.S. government actions since 9/11. America’s standing across the Middle East has plummeted. Our Israeli-centric Middle Eastern policy continues to outrage even our allies in the region, making it harder to gain the cooperation of Arab governments and security services to pursue the task we should have accomplished  or, at least, attempted  in the immediate aftermath of 9/11: rounding up the leadership of this terrorist cabal and eliminating them once and for all.

The Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington was predicated on the principle that the best defense is a good offense  with the result that we are now bogged down in both Afghanistan and Iraq with our soft underbelly exposed to the enemy. They invaded Iraq because it was “doable,” as Paul Wolfowitz so memorably put it. Yet, as we spend $12 billion per month in Iraq, the biometric system the 9/11 Commission called for, and Congress agreed was necessary, is apparently not doable, at least by our government.

Also not doable: the traditional low-tech approach to border security. Two years ago, the GAO pointed out that investigators had “successfully entered the United States using fictitious driver’s licenses and other bogus documentation through nine land ports of entry on the northern and southern borders” between February and May 2005. Counterfeit identification? Our intrepid Customs and Border Patrol officers didn’t notice the fakes, and, in too many cases, didn’t even bother to check identification documents.

I wonder what happened to the border guards who messed up so badly. Ten to one they’re still working for the same government agencies, albeit with a stern wrist-slapping note appended to their official records.

The TSA makes us take off our shoes at every airport but doesn’t bother inspecting cargo in planes for explosives. Our president is telling us that the central theater of the war on terrorism is in Iraq  while, in America, our ports are wide open to a nuclear device masquerading as a shipment of coconuts.

We were attacked on 9/11, and the administration, instead of fighting back, essentially surrendered  or, at least, gave up entirely the concept of defending the continental United States from another horrific assault. Instead, they went charging around the world on a wild goose chase that has exhausted our resources and the patience of the American people.

What’s scary is that these are the folks charged with defending us  a realization that would imbue Pollyanna with a sense of impending doom.

Yes, we are at war with the network of groups and individuals who planned and executed the 9/11 terrorist attacks  not with the Mahdi Army, the Iranians, the Syrians, and/or anyone who looks cross-eyed at the Israelis. As we bray and posture, asserting our right to preemptively attack any nation on earth, glorying in our role as the global hegemon, the reality is that we are for all intents and purposes utterly defenseless.

What this means is that another terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11  or worse  is practically inevitable. Which is what our very own government officials, both here and in Britain, have been telling us since 2001. It’s called covering your ass  and it’s the only job governments everywhere are very good at.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

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