That's how long it has been since we have had a terrorist attack on American soil. Seven years. There was nobody, and I mean nobody, who thought on September 11, 2001 that we would be able to go so long without another attack, myself included.

Victor Davis Hanson, as he so often does, has written a brilliant piece for National Review Online reflecting on last seven years. Some bits:

Years later, we tend to forget all the dimensions of that sinister homicidal bombing of our institutions. Radical Islam brazenly signaled that it need not have missiles or sophisticated bombers to burn 16 acres in the heart of Manhattan and set the Pentagon afire. Instead, it could turn from the inside out our own technology against us, in a manner that we were scarcely aware of — and in an iconic fashion at the heart of our greatest cities, ensuring collective psychological trauma that trumped even the terrible loss in blood and treasure.

...While many rightly point to lapses in the conduct of the Iraq war, faulty intelligence, and wrongheaded emphasis on supposed arsenals of WMDs rather than the casus belli outlined in the 23 writs authorized by the Congress, few can answer a more existential question: Had we not met, defeated, and humiliated tens of thousands of jihadists on the battlefields of Iraq, where else might we have inflicted such a terrible defeat on our enemies — given the nuclear sanctuary of Pakistan, the bellicose governments of Iran and Syria, and the duplicity of the Gulf monarchies? And if we had not killed, captured, scattered, and turned our enemies abroad, how then might we have prevented them from coming back here to attack us at home? And are the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, as in the past, aiding anti-American terrorists, or helping to hunt them down?

...But in years to come it may well be said that the president kept us safe for years when none thought he could, and removed the two most odious regimes in the Middle East and replaced them with the two best — and confronted a confident and ascendant radical Islam and left it demoralized and discredited among its own host Arab and Muslim constituents.

Thank you, President Bush for staying strong in face of unbelievable adversity, and for taking the fight to the enemy.

Thank you, men and women of our military, for your incredible sacrifice for and service to our country.

Thank you, leaders, intelligence agents, and law enforcement personnel of those foreign countries that have joined us in fighting Al Qaeda.

Whoever the next president is, he is going to have a heck of a challenge matching Bush's record against terrorism.