The failed Detroit attack has been treated as too much of a crisis. A Conservative commentator or congressman (it is hard to tell the difference) said a few days ago that it only takes one attack that is successful to bring us low. He was just wrong in his application of the adage used by Israelis to describe what would happen to them if they lost a war: they would be over as a nation. The United States, for its part, would not be over if the Detroit bomber had succeeded or even if a number of such attacks succeeded. We would just have to press the fight against Islamic Fundamentalism more vigorously. Yes, we do want to stay ahead of the terrorists in their weapons and tactics, and so far we have done that. But it was also correct of Janet Napolitano to say that the system worked even if it became politic for her to claim the next day that she had misspoken in that she was referring to the way the system worked after the failed Detroit attack rather than what had happened before that. The system worked because one of its measures worked even if others didn’t. It is true that the authorities did not manage to keep the terrorist off the plane even though they had enough information to justify doing so. The local embassy should have just lifted the terrorist’s passport when his father, who was clearly no kook, came in to warn them about him. But the screening procedures at boarding, however deficient, did prevent him from taking an assembled bomb onto the plane. What he had to do was assemble the workings once airborne, and this he was not able to do successfully, and so the bomb did not go off but simply caught fire. That saved the plane. The point of screening procedures, as is the case with any security measures, is to make entry for criminal purposes more difficult not to prevent them entirely. Locks can be picked, but that doesn’t mean we should never lock the door.

What measures would be put in place if there were a number of successful attacks by suicide bombers on our planes? We would almost certainly be less queasy about violations of modesty, but there would be no need to deprive people of civil liberties they have not already consented to doing without by deciding to buy an airline ticket. Measures to seriously thwart suicide bombers that could be put in place right now so as to prevent us having to play catch-up would include requiring airline passengers to provide a reason for traveling and either the phone number of the business or the person being visited or the hotel which held a reservation so that the alibi could be checked out. Providing a reason for travel was certainly what happened during World War II to justify filling one of the few air plane seats available. You could also make use of the personal profiling that the Israelis use. Sure, that would make wait times longer, and that might result in fewer flyers. But that would be a good thing: fewer people for security to manage; fewer other flyers to take the ever reduced number of seats that airlines make available. And anyway it is time to get on with a major switch to rail transportation to make most short haul air trips unnecessary. Trains might become the next target, but then we could turn to improving safety there. Security, after all, is a defensive measure, while the main way to go after our enemies is to attack them in their lairs, as we are doing in Yemen and Pakistan and Afghanistan.

There are casualties in wars. There are even civilian casualties in most wars, though the United States has been spared that in all of our wars since the Revolutionary War. London suffered from V-1 and V-2 bombings. The East End of London suffered from Luftwaffe raids during the Battle of Britain. The Brits did not give up. If we are serious that we are facing a real enemy, and there is no reason to think otherwise, since they have hit our homeland before, then we should expect that they will hit our homeland again. The nation, in that event, would not collapse, nor would the will of the American people. People adapt to what they have to deal with. You can lose many battles and still win the war. Ask Washington or Lincoln or FDR.

Obama failed to address the larger policy issues in his address yesterday on the failed attempt in Detroit. He spent too much time describing the how of what went wrong and what can be done to fix it so that we are never caught out again. The requirement on the President, however, is different than what it is for a policy briefer. Obama should have concentrated on what the American people did not want to hear but needed to hear and which they would have been inspired by having heard. He should have put Detroit in the larger context of the fact that it seems likely that one of the enemy will successfully carry out a mission on American soil, and that nothing of the sort will deter us from carrying the fight to the enemy until there is not a sympathizer of the Taliban or Al Qaeda left who will be willing to admit it. We will intimidate our enemies and allow them to cower. Then we can worry about their hearts and minds. Obama should have used his eloquence to awaken the American people to what it is to be at war, however much that rhetoric has been cheapened by all the Republicans who use strong language about the war only as a way to get other American citizens to hate Obama. The fact of war is that there are casualties and that the civilian population makes sacrifices.

One of the many awful legacies of the Bush Administration is that so simple an observation was discredited by Bush’s insistence that he could not think of any way in which the American people had to sacrifice anything. Well, there are things, mostly minor, that are useful to sacrifice so as to further the war effort: convenience, accessibility to services until now taken for granted, such as air transportation or, in a pinch, rail transport. There is also a need for a heightened awareness of the fact that we are not secure, that people are out to get us unless we get them first. Why does this have to be said so many years after 9/11? Because Bush fumbled the opportunity to say it and to put it into practice and so the American people have become a bit blasé about the war. Detroit was a wake up call that danger still lurks, though the threat resides in the general confrontation between us and our Jihadist enemies rather than in one particular attack in Detroit that didn’t even come off. Did people a week ago think we were going to get off scot free? And if they didn’t, why are they carrying on so much now, as if the sky was falling down and not just the prospect that  a single plane will fall from the sky?