IT’S been all but impossible not to get the sense, over the past six months or so, that sophisticated opinion across the political spectrum has begun to question just how significant a threat Islamic extremist terror poses to the United States. Opinion has been growing that American policy since 9/11 has been a colossal overreaction.

Even a Reaganite hawk like George F. Will has had occasion to speak in startlingly dismissive terms about the attack on American soil five years ago. “Two hours of terrorism one September morning,” Will recently called the attack, which he contrasted with the decades of terrorism suffered by Israel.

So: If the plot to blow up 10 U.S.-bound aircraft had not been foiled yesterday by the magnificent work of British law enforcement, would the simultaneous destruction of those planes have constituted merely “a few minutes of terrorism”?

And what a relatively insignificant “few minutes of terrorism” those might have been. After all, the “two hours of terrorism” five years ago might have included the destruction of either the Capitol or the White House if the noble passengers aboard Flight 93 hadn’t saved this country from an attempted political decapitation. This latest scheme would merely have killed a few thousand people. Only planes would have gone up in flames, and new planes are built every day . . .

I don’t mean to ridicule George Will, the best American columnist of our time. Even he can have a bad rhetorical day. But his words were suggestive of a cold-eyed, revisionist view of the past five years that runs as follows:

We were hit. We responded by going into Afghanistan to nail al Qaeda and take out the regime that harbored it. That was OK, but the idea of taking out the rogue regime in Iraq has proved such a disaster that it now calls into question even our actions in Afghanistan.

Will himself lumped the two efforts together in negative terms by saying our response to those two mere hours of terrorism was the “toppling [of] two regimes halfway around the world with wars that show no signs of ending.”

Fine. But since 9/11, we haven’t had any more “two hours of terrorism” on American soil. The combination of domestic and foreign-policy changes since the attacks might has more than a little to do with that.

Here at home, passage of the Patriot Act finally unshackled law-enforcement officers to fight terror – who proceeded to disrupt seven training cells in the United States. This week alone saw terrorism-related arrests in Ohio and Michigan. And cryptic remarks by the president and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggest that U.S. intelligence helped crack yesterday’s plot.

Outside our borders, Americans in uniform have engaged in actual combat with al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists since 9/11. These heroic men and women have been killed and injured in the thousands by improvised explosive devices used by al Qaeda terrorists. But they have also returned fire and killed thousands of Islamofascist terrorists – both in Afghanistan and Iraq. Every one of those killed was a direct threat to the United States. Absent our military engagement, might some or all of them have been free to become players in terror plots elsewhere?

Today we have reason to be more grateful than ever for those who have served this country with such valor fighting the bad guys in those countries “halfway across the world” – countries that, in fact, are only as far away as a plane ride.

jpodhoretz@gmail.com