Fooling Ourselves Into Feeling Safe

A little past midnight in the early morning of Sept. 9, 2001, a Maryland state trooper spotted a car driving at more than 90 miles an hour on I-95, the busy interstate that connects Washington to New York and Boston.

The driver was Ziad Jarrah, shortly to become world famous as the lead hijacker of United Flight 93, the plane that crashed in the fields of Pennsylvania. Jarrah was the only member of the Flight 93 hijack squad who knew how to fly a plane: Without him, that attack would have had to be cancelled. He was the only member of the Flight 93 group to know that other hijackings were also planned for September 11. Had he been arrested, detained, and questioned, who knows what might have happened? He was carrying a Virginia driver's license with a false address; he had a bank account attached to another false address; his name had enough suspicion attached to it to have triggered detention and questioning when he'd passed through the United Arab Emirates in January 2001.

So you would expect that any international terrorist worth his salt would know: On your way to the hijacking of the century, it's probably a good idea to drive the speed limit. And yet, Jarrah -- the wealthiest, most sophisticated, and probably most intelligent of the 9/11 attackers -- broke the most basic rule in the book.

In the past week, there's been a lot of loose talk in the Canadian media about how the 17 alleged terror suspects are not "real terrorists." They were sloppy, careless, and in many ways inept -- pitiful shlubs, really.

And so perhaps they were. But were they worse than Ziad Jarrah? Were they worse than the Madrid bombers, who killed 192 Spaniards and wounded 2,000 more on March 11, 2004? A ringleader of the Spanish bombing, Jamal Zougam, was raided twice by Spanish police, once in July 2001 and then again in November. Knowing that he was under suspicion, Zougam nonetheless used cellphones from his own cellphone shop as detonators for the 13 bomb satchels lower-echelon terrorists placed in the Atocha train station. Had these footsoldiers been stopped on the way, and the bombs found, police would have been able to use the cellphones to implicate Zougam. Zougam foolishly used his own cellphone to keep in contact with the rest of his ring -- implying that his arrest would probably have led to the rollup of the entire cell.

It's now known that Osama bin Laden had no idea that flying an airliner into the World Trade Center would melt the towers' steel supports and bring them crashing down. He just got lucky. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, did not understand that plastic explosive cannot be triggered with a match. He was unlucky.

The bombers who attacked the London subway last year never attended an Afghan training camp: They prepared for their murders by taking a course in whitewater rafting at a camp in northern Wales. That turned out to have been enough.

None of these killers, would-be killers, and alleged would-be killers were exactly the old Soviet NKVD. Without prejudging the accused in the Ontario case, their ham-handedness, their sloppy tradecraft, their comical training exercises: These are all exactly like what "real terrorists" do. And had the security service been less vigilant and effective, the victims of these buffoonish alleged would-be killers would have been just as dead as the victims of 9/11, 3/11 and 7/7.

Those who emphasize the reported incompetence of the Ontario 17 do so for a very important psychological reason: It allows them to minimize the danger terrorism presents to Canada and Canadians.

Of all nations on Earth, Canada stands out for its remarkable refusal to acknowledge threats to its security. The Pew global attitudes poll (pewglobal.org) in 2005 asked citizens of the major democracies whether they felt concerned or unconcerned about the threat posed by Islamic extremism to their countries. Only 13% of Indians felt "unconcerned," 21% of Germans, 26% of French, 28% of Americans and Brits -- but fully 41% of Canadians. Only Poles were less worried.

At the same time, Canadians persist in believing that everybody likes them. That same Pew survey found that only 26% of Americans described the United States as "well-liked" around the world. Germany and Britain had higher opinions of their popularity: 51% and 56% of Germans and Brits thought their countries "well-liked." The French were still more self-congratulatory: 80% thought France "well-liked." But no country on earth had so unanimous a conviction of its own popularity than Canada: Fully 94% of Canadians believed themselves well-liked.

The alleged Ontario plot ought, if nothing else, to alert Canadians that they sit in the same boat as all the other Western democracies, and that the forces that plot harm to Americans, Indians, Israelis and Spaniards also plot harm against them. It's an unpleasant education -- but Canadians should be thankful it was bought at so low a cost in human suffering and grief.