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Are you safer now than five years ago?

President Bush is holding photo-ops at Ground Zero and at the National Counterterrorism Center. Cheney and his ilk have taken to the nation's airwaves to warn against any "complacency" Americans may feel five years after Sept. 11, 2001. The latest bin Laden propaganda video is on heavy rotation on the nightly news. Yes, it's election season, and the GOP's fear-mongering machine is in full effect. But, there's a fundamental dichotomy that's preventing their ploy from succeeding as it did in 2002 and 2004. Bush is in his sixth year in office, and Republicans have controlled all three branches of the federal government for the past four years. Should they emphasize how they've made us safer? Or should they rely on the fear card, and tell us to believe that we are just vulnerable as we were on Sept. 10, 2001?

Right now, Republicans are claiming both sides of the issue. After the arrest of several British Muslims for planning to blow up flights to America, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said of al Qaeda "It's been five years since they've been capable of putting together something of this sort ... We've destroyed their training camps, we've killed a lot of their leaders, we've captured a lot of their leaders." If that's the case, then what of the numerous massive terrorist attacks that the Bush administration alleges to have foiled? What of the thwarted al Qaeda operation, announced by Bush last year, to fly a plane "into the tallest building on the West Coast?" It shouldn't be forgotten that this was a plan that, in his own words, was "already set in motion."

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It's a nasty quandary in the mind of Karl Rove and other Republican strategists. If the American people think that the Bush gang has done too good a job of dismantling al Qaeda, then they'll elect Democrats, who are widely preferred on domestic issues like the economy, health care and Social Security (not to mention Iraq). At the same time, if al Qaeda seems too threatening, then it indicates that the current administration has been ineffective and voters may turn against the incumbent party.

Hence, terrorism is kept at arm's length. America fights terrorists "over there" (in Iraq and Afghanistan) so that we don't have to fight them "over here." Osama bin Laden remains a menacing but peripheral figure, only surfacing around election time. We're reminded that we haven't had a major terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11, but the Homeland Security threat advisory system has never been lower than yellow, i.e., "significant risk" of attack.

Hopefully, the Democrats have enough sense to point out this hypocrisy and to attack the Republican strategy at its most vulnerable point: the premise that Iraq is the "central front in the War on Terror." In a recent poll, only 9 percent of Americans felt that the war in Iraq was serving to decrease terrorism. All of the photo-ops and coy positioning attempted by this administration cannot change the reality that thousands of Americans are dead because we are stuck in a civil war in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. And while we have escaped a major attack, England, Spain, Israel and Indonesia, to name a few, have not been so lucky. The world is not a safer place than it was in 2001, but our best hopes lie with a new Democratic majority. Jason Sheltzer is a molecular biology major from St. Davids, Pa. He can be reached at sheltzer@princeton.edu.

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