The National Counterterrorism Council's A CHRONOLOGY OF SIGNIFICANT INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM FOR 2004 is on the streets, and it's an ugly duckling.
According to Susan B. Glasser of THE WASHINGTON POST, top aides from the State Department and NCTC admitted to Congress that the increase in terrorist incidents in '04 constituted a "dramatic uptick." Yet, according to NCTC's terrorism report, "Year to year changes in the number of attacks may not be the best measure of international effectiveness in preventing attacks..."
If the number of attacks isn't the best measure of our ability to prevent them, one wonders what a better measure of our ability to prevent them might be. You can bet a paycheck that if the number of attacks were down significantly, that metric would be touted as "proof" that the Global War on Terrorism was a smashing success.
We may not be "losing" this war. But three and a half years and hundreds of billions of dollars after the 9-11-01, we're not "winning" it either.
JLH
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