Job well done by our security services and that's the way it should be. After all it's their job, whether there is a war on terror or not.
Did our world come to a stop when we were engaged in a Cold War (which threatened greater devastation) for 50+ years? Hell no, our security agencies dealt with the bad guys as they do now with the exception that they didn't generate headlines.
I think you are living in an alternate world. Time to get back to the real world.
No, I live in the real world with an understanding garnered from first hand experience by having lived through it. People with limited knowledge come to limited conclusions and maintain an outlook that just because they think something is so, it makes it so.