It's worth pondering just what it is that the Democrats are arguing here. They claim not that President Bush isn't doing enough to keep America safe from terrorism, but that he's doing too much. The implication is that the threat of terrorism within America is not all that serious and never was--that 9/11, horrific though it was, was a one-off.

There is, at the very least, a tension between this blasé approach and the oft-heard Democratic claim that liberating Iraq increased the threat of terrorism. If that threat still isn't serious enough to justify the merest attenuation of "civil liberties," then this argument against Iraq, even if true, is trivial.

In any I think an argument can be made that the Democrats' current approach to terrorism is a dangerously complacent one.

The 9/11 attacks plainly were not a one-off; even before Sept. 11, 2001, the World Trade Center had been hit in 1993, and Omar Abdel-Rahman, the so-called blind sheik, had gone to prison in a plot to blow up New York City bridges and tunnels. There was also the attack on the USS Cole, among other foreign targets.

True, there hasn't been a major terror attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. But it would be stunningly fatuous to conclude therefrom that the threat is negligible.

It may be that we are out of danger for now because of the efforts the Bush administration has taken to prevent attacks, and that the Democrats, by opposing those efforts, are inviting another mass murder of Americans. Or it may be that the administration's efforts have not been sufficient, and another terrorist attack is only a matter of time.

Either way, if there is another attack on the scale of 9/11, complacency about terrorism would be wholly untenable. The public would demand much tougher measures.

By fretting about imagined threats to civil liberties today, the Democratic leadership may be helping to endanger real civil liberties tomorrow.