The key to any terror group is patience, knowing when and where to strike and allowing all the rhetoric, all the guns and all the political fury to die down. Even with the arrest of this alleged plot -- and, it is still alleged, nobody's been convicted yet -- al-Qaida succeeded by disrupting the norm. That's all a terrorist has to do -- disrupt the norm and take us out of our comfort zone.

They've done this repeatedly with false leaks of other supposed attacks and we have responded in Pavlovian style, tongues hanging, nerves frizzed, tensions increased as we've upped the terror level and put many hours and dollars into examining ports, bridges, shopping malls, the House and Senate office buildings, airports sporting events, political conventions, you name it.

It was the Brits who uncovered this plot, which should tell you something about our intelligence community (a genuine oxymoron).

Meanwhile, we can't find a 6-feet, 7-inch tall guy with a long beard, turban and toting an AK-47 who is at the heart of it all. By now, he could be hiding out in western Iron County, providing security for polygamist guru Warren Jeffs.

The insurgents in Iraq, the Hezbollah and Hamas are tough cookies. They fight dirty. They suck us in, drain our forces and money and play a cat-and-mouse game we are incapable of thwarting, just like in Vietnam, just like in Korea.

So, are we safer?

No. Our foreign debt is owned by unfriendlies like China and Iraq, our soldiers are now in the body count game because there are no turf wins, our American public is being stiffed because the majority believes fighting in Iraq is a mistake and our president goes on vacation, once again, when there's a world crisis that could elevate to biblical proportions at any moment.