I walked out of the metro in Washington yesterday to find Union Station cordoned off, with police everywhere. “Suspicious package,” a cop told me. We have a lot of those down here these days.

When I got to work and turned on my computer I read the news of the foiled London terror plot.

If you feel safer now than you did before September 11 and before we invaded Iraq, kudos, because I sure don’t.

Those of us who live in the big targets–Washington, New York, Boston, LA, SF, Seattle, etc–have internalized the terror threat. We don’t freak out when warned of suspicious packages, or when we have to evacuate mass transit, or when the Bush Administration tells us that insurgents in Iraq are aiming for our shores (Crawford is inland).

Us blue city folk opposed the war in Iraq because we knew it would strengthen Al-Qaeda, not weaken it.

“The bungled occupation of Iraq has drawn new recruits to the jihadist cause around the world, and now the disproportionate Israeli assault on Lebanon is doing the same thing,” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson writes today. “We are at war with an ideology, and pounding it frontally just disperses it. It’s like trying to smash mercury with a hammer.”

A few days ago a friend joked that someone should start a 527 to find Osama. That’s how far the Bush Administration has taken its eye off the ball.

Listening to the White House you’d think Ned Lamont and Jack Murtha were greater threats to our security than bin Laden, whose name Bush dares not utter.

Oh, and by the way, a suicide bomber killed 35 in the holy city of Najaf, Iraq, yesterday. Such savage attacks occur with increasingly regularity. And another suicide bomber killed a NATO soldier in Afghanistan, which is practically dead to the Bush Administration.

The fifth anniversary of 9/11 is a month away. How exactly are we “winning” the war on terror?