Americans Didn't Overreact to 9/11

Did America overreact to September 11? In a recent column in Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria answered that with an emphatic and mournful “yes.” In Mr. Zakaria’s telling, we’ve squandered billions of dollars heedlessly feeding our national security bureaucracies, which hardly provide us, as the French nicely put it, a very good rapport qualité-prix. Worse, we’ve created an intrusive, abrasive, civil-rights-mauling security and intelligence apparatus that “now touches every aspect of American-life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism.” Mr. Zakaria uses the book Zeitoun, about a Syrian-American who finds herself bounced around by National Guardsmen and other counterterrorist dimwits in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as an exemplar of American decency forfeited since September 11, via our never-ending war against Al Qaeda, an outfit that, as it turns out, really isn’t much of a threat at all.