The requisite 9/11 post

The last time I was in New York, in late 2005, I saw a tourist posing in front of Ground Zero with a smile across his face as his wife took his picture.

It was one of the most absurd and inappropriate things I've ever seen. And it was a reminder, as if we needed one, that we can ill afford to sanitize what happened five years ago - no matter how many glossy movies Hollywood serves up to help us try.

But then, of all the dangers out there, that one's pretty low on the list. Because if anything, we've gone too far in the other direction.

I'm not going to suggest for a moment that we should've carried on post-9/11 as though nothing happened - as if that was an option anyway. It called, obviously, for vast changes to the ways that we protect ourselves. And it called for military action, albeit not the military action that's preoccupied the U.S. since 2003.

But did it call for all of us to dramatically change our lives - to reorder priorities and surrender liberties and become inherently more suspicious? Did it require us to abandon the liberal values that supposedly allowed al-Qaeda to operate under our noses?

The men behind 9/11 certainly would have hoped so. After all, it was those values they were attacking. And if the point of terrorism is to terrorize targeted states into change they'd otherwise reject, then it stands to reason that their efforts bore considerable fruit.

It would be awfully simple-minded to suggest we've let the terrorists win. More to the point, it would be inaccurare. Al-Qaeda is considerably the worse for wear compared with five years ago, and Western society is a long, long way from collapsing. But if civilians insist on seeing ourselves as soldiers in the war on terror, the best we can do is hold our ground. The less we let ourselves be bullied into forgetting who we are, the closer we come to victory.