They haven’t gone away

David Ignatius’s column today on the dangers of a nuclear attack by al Qaeda is absolutely essential reading. Ignatius, who is neither a scaremonger nor a shrill but an experienced journalist with incomparable intelligence sources, lays out the reasons to worry about what al Qaeda has up its sleeve.

Perhaps, the greatest puzzle of the last six years is why al Qaeda stood down a cyanide attack on the New York subway. Ignatius reports that Zawahiri told the “plotters to stand down because ‘we have something better in mind.’”

Certainly, one of the reasons why the United States hasn’t been attacked since 9/11 is that al Qaeda would like to one up those attacks when it next strikes. It would be foolhardy in the extreme to believe that al Qaeda’s failure to kill thousands in Western capitals in the last six years is proof that the threat from it has been over-hyped.