In post-9/11 America a politician seeking applause need only call terrorists "murderers," "barbarians," and "cowards" and vow that terrorism will never succeed. But if by "succeed" one means have a dramatic effect on the way people live, terrorism has in fact done remarkably well.

In New York City, where I live, signs of Osama bin Laden's success are ubiquitous. This August, police armed with automatic weapons were on patrol after an Orange Alert warned of another al Qaeda attack. And when the Republicans descended on New York for their convention, the city filled with helicopters, surveillance blimps, subway police patrols, roadblocks, and swarms of cops clad in shorts racing around on bicycles.

If you tally up the bill bin Laden has levied on the United States in unprecedented levels of security at bridges, ports, airline terminals, border crossings, skyscrapers, chemical factories, and nuclear-power plants, the total runs into the tens of billions of dollars per year since 2001. The 9/11 Commission notes that between 2001 and 2004 "total federal spending on defense (including expenditures on both Iraq and Afghanistan), homeland security, and international affairs rose more than 50 percent, from $354 billion to about $547 billion" and that "the United States has not experienced such a rapid surge in national security spending since the Korean War."

But the effects go well beyond spending. People are now noticeably uneasy about air travel, which has become more arduous because of heightened security and the long lines that accompany it. And the architecture of government itself has changed -- absent 9/11, there would be no Department of Homeland Security, no Patriot Act, no Northern Command, and no plans to appoint a new intelligence czar. Bin Laden hoped to bring fear and financial strain to the United States. He has brought us a very large measure of both.

Less momentously, bin Laden has made "Anonymous," the CIA employee who wrote Imperial Hubris, a best-selling author. Coincidentally, the appearance of the book was followed by an intelligence failure of sorts: no sooner did the book hit the stores than the author's cover was blown. Writing in the July 2 Boston Phoenix, Jason Vest identified the author as Michael Scheuer, a veteran CIA analyst specializing in radical Islam in Afghanistan and the Arab world and, from 1996 to 1999, the leader of the agency's bin Laden task force.

Judging from his book, Scheuer is angry, having watched the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations fail to comprehend the consequences of the growing hatred of the United States in the Muslim world. From the first page Scheuer makes it clear that he believes that the massacre of some 3,000 Americans on September 11 was a failure of political leadership, not intelligence:

U.S. intelligence officers -- often at the risk of their lives -- had spent most of a decade gathering and analyzing the intelligence that, had it been used fully and honestly, would have allowed all U.S. leaders and, indeed, all Americans to know what sort of storm was approaching. Those officers knew a runaway train was coming at the United States, documented that fact, and then watched helplessly -- or were banished for speaking out -- as their senior leaders delayed action, downplayed intelligence, ignored repeated warnings, and generally behaved as what they so manifestly are, America's greatest generation -- of moral cowards.

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But the great strength of Imperial Hubris lies less in its white-hot anger than in Scheuer's assessment of the real problem facing the United States. (Although the subtitle of his book refers to "the West" he is in fact almost exclusively concerned with the United States.) His persuasive analysis of the problem, along with his somewhat more questionable remedies, can be briefly stated as follows:

1. In al Qaeda the United States faces "a worldwide Islamic insurgency," not a band of criminals and terrorists.

2. Bin Laden's indictment of the United States is not about who we are and how we live, but about what we do. More specifically, he accuses the United States of making war against Islam in its uncritical support of Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands and the lavish flow of American economic and military aid to Israel; efforts to prop up corrupt and pliant regimes in the Muslim world; the emplacement of American troops in Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Islam; the double standard of ignoring Israel's nuclear weapons while condemning efforts by Muslim states to acquire such armaments; complicity in, or failure to condemn, the oppression of Muslims in the West Bank, Gaza, Chechnya, and Kashmir; the support for self-determination for East Timorese and the former Soviet republics, but not for Palestinians, Kashmiri Muslims, or Chechens.

3. Bin Laden is not an aberration in Islam: his message resonates among the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, a very significant proportion of whom have come to hate the United States and lionize bin Laden since 9/11. The invasion of Iraq has increased Muslims' anger and given bin Laden a windfall in new supporters and resources. Policies of "regime change" and grandiose visions of exporting American-style democracy to the Middle East only aggravate this hatred.

4. Public-relations efforts directed at the Islamic world -- cultural exchanges, professions of respect for Islam -- will not help so long as policies that alienate Muslims continue.

5. Al Qaeda's specific grievances and goals attract broad, sustainable support among Muslims and explain why even $100 million in American reward money has failed to entice a confidant to betray bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri, his chief lieutenant.

6. Muslim veterans of wars in Algeria, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Chechnya, and Bosnia, trained in a variety of skills (both military and non-military), offer a steady stream of manpower for al Qaeda.

7. To defeat al Qaeda, the United States must abandon its law-enforcement approach -- gathering evidence and using it to apprehend and prosecute the movement's operatives -- and shift to an all-out war of Shermanesque brutality (Scheuer is enamored of Civil War history and uses it to stress how uncompromising war is and how ruthless a successful campaign against Al Qaeda must be). Americans should have no illusions: in such a war many of our soldiers will die, and victory will be long in coming.

8. The war that brought down the Taliban was not such a ruthless campaign. It was launched October 7, 2001, after three weeks of delay. In the interim, many Taliban and al Qaeda fighters fled to Pakistan. The war was also waged on the cheap by relying primarily on Northern Alliance ground forces and American air power to minimize American casualties.

9. Al Qaeda is regrouping in Afghanistan and Pakistan thanks to the less-than-all-out war in Afghanistan. Moreover, during the subsequent American-led battles against al Qaeda at Tora Bora (December 2001) and Shahi Kowt (March 2002), thousands of al Qaeda and Taliban fighters slipped across the border into Pakistan, where they found shelter and support.

10. The current American-backed government of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan is doomed. Most Pushtuns, Afghanistan's largest and most politically powerful ethnic group, see it as an organ of the minority Tajiks and Uzbeks, who dominated the Northern Alliance; that Karzai is himself a Pushtun makes little difference. Key radical Islamist Pushtun leaders (Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Abd al-Rasul Sayyaf, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and Younes Khalis) have now aligned with the Taliban. Scheuer predicts, "Karzai's defeat may not come tomorrow, the day after, or even next year . . . but come it will, and the Prophet's banner will again be unfurled over Kabul."

Scheuer is convinced that worse is yet to come because al Qaeda has doggedly sought nuclear weapons and has succeeded in getting sympathetic Islamic theologians to legitimize their use against civilians in a campaign that is being defined as nothing less than a defense of Islam. Scheuer's book is, in short, filled with alarming predictions and scathing criticisms of American leadership.

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Unlike Imperial Hubris, the bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report -- an election-year document assembled by an august body of equal numbers Democrats and Republicans -- is pedestrian, platitudinous, and designed not to offend. To be sure, it presents a stunningly thorough and revealing history of how the 9/11 attack was conceived, planned, funded, and executed; the documentation is impeccable, and the footnotes alone are a treasure trove of information. Although it does note lapses by various bureaucracies, as well as ineffectual intelligence and security, no individuals or organizations are held responsible for failing to prevent 9/11, or even for specific failures to improve preparedness despite previous attacks on American embassies (in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998), warships (the ramming of the U.S.S. Cole in 2000), and buildings (the car bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993). Moreover, and in stark contrast with Scheuer, the report also steers clear of the controversial discussion of how American policies in the Muslim -- and in particular the Arab -- world may have contributed to al Qaeda's rise and appeal.

Yet while the commission's lawyerly presentation of the background of 9/11 does not indict the Bush administration, it hardly paints it in a flattering light. The report substantiates Richard Clarke's charge that the administration failed to take the al Qaeda threat seriously and makes clear that this inattentiveness was not due to a lack of intelligence. While there were no warnings that a particular kind of attack would happen at a particular time against a particular target, there were plenty of FBI and CIA reports that bin Laden was determined to strike inside the United States. A "Presidential Daily Brief" submitted in August 2001 said so in its very title: "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." Intelligence reports also warned specifically of airplane hijackings. And after arresting Zacarias Moussaoui in August 2001, the FBI informed the CIA director George Tenet that the radical Islamist had been taking flying lessons. The title of Chapter 8, taken from a comment by Tenet, underscores the presence of warning signs: "