Exactly seven years after 9/11, the war against jihadist terrorists has been an unappreciated success. Nobody should take that success for granted. In those seven years, despite numerous plans and several attempts by terrorists to replicate or even surpass that horrendous day, they have not succeeded a single time on U.S. soil. No body count of innocents. No successful biological or chemical attacks. No airports, bridges, buildings, or trains blown up. Nothing. President Bush’s strategy has succeeded far beyond what the experts predicted would be the case in the weeks following the horrors at the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and the rural field where Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, Pa.

The cynics, though, shout that we lost our focus on terrorism by invading Iraq. They are dead wrong. If the war and reconstruction of Iraq was really a dangerous diversion from the war on terrorism, as so many liberal politicians and commentators say, then why have Americans been so safe in our homeland? Why haven’t any “dirty nukes” exploded? Could it be that the effort in Iraq, as messy as it has been, has undercut the terrorists by sucking a host of them to Iraq only to die there, as die they should?