Colorado professor Ira Chernus, amid a banal refrain on the tired old theme that America deserves the terror attacks because we’re the real terrorists, concurs that the same critics attacking Bush for not taking preemptive action would have attacked him then if he had:

“Suppose the Bush administration had heeded the urgent pleas of Richard Clarke. Suppose they had made stopping Osama’s agents their very highest goal. Suppose they had done everything that Clarke and other antiterrorism experts advised. How would we on the left, in the peace and justice movement, have responded?

“We would have called it fear-mongering. We would have decried their skewed priorities. Every time they stopped an Arab tourist on suspicion, or made us take off our shoes at the airport, we would have denounced the emerging police state.”