It is, however, beginning to look as if it is possible that the pro-war faction overestimated the strength of Al-Qaeda, and so it is beginning to look as though the pro-war case was weaker than I thought it was at the time. I know that one of the thoughts running through my mind on September 11, and thereafter, was "what will the next atrocity be?"
After all, if you are in the business of creating terror you have to create fear, and fear is made up of what people think may happen to them in the future--not what horrible things have happened to the dead in the past. If I had been in Muhammed Atef's place--eager to inflict terror upon the U.S. and thus force its troops to withdraw from Saudi Arabia just as the events of "Black Hawk Down" forced its withdrawal from Somalia--I would have used no more than 1/5 of my U.S.-located assets on September 11, and I would have had other equally-destructive operations ready to go thereafter (once a month, say).
Senior U.S. military, domestic, and law enforcement officials certainly believed that September 11 was just Phase I of an Al-Qaeda operation that had many more phases yet to come. Thus the U.S. responses--the thousand or so people now held as "material witnesses" or for immigration offenses and the attack on the Taliban--were intended as much as an attempt (feared likely to be futile) to prevent the next waves of Al-Qaeda atrocities as an attempt to apprehend and punish perpetrators and enforce the principle that governments that sponsor wholesale terrorism do not last.
But it is now 11/20--70 days after 9/11--and (unless the anthrax letters are an Al-Qaeda operation masquerading as something else) there has been no second wave of atrocities. Either the large-scale preventive detention operation worked or the bombing worked and disrupted the plans for Phase II, or Al-Qaeda has been greatly overestimated. Perhaps Muhammed Atef and company thought that one such atrocity would be enough to induce the U.S. to immediately pull out of Saudi Arabia and cut off aid to Israel. Perhaps Muhammed Atef and company simply didn't think of the consequences that success at a large-scale terrorist atrocity would have. Perhaps Al-Qaeda has struck again, but the FAA is covering it up. I don't know. I do know that I expected to see at least one and probably more atrocities by now, and I haven't.
Thus to the extent that the case for the war was based on what Al-Qaeda was about to do rather than what it had done, that case seems somewhat weaker today than it seemed to me in mid-September...
Brad DeLong