Last week Adm. Michael McConnell, director of national intelligence, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that al-Qaida is making significant progress in improving its ability to attack the United States at home.

His assessment, which received astonishing little attention in America's media, had the eerie ring of the now-infamous Presidential Daily Briefing of Aug. 6, 2001 entitled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S." That warning was placed in front of President Bush a month before 9/11.

Adm. McConnell's new warning bears close attention. The first reason is that it is undoubtedly true. Militants who hate the United States -- an important qualifier -- now have at least five effective training grounds. These include Iraq, a free-fire hands-on academy for killers in the use of suicide bombs, hit-and-run mortar attacks, vehicles loaded with explosive and mines; Afghanistan, again; and allegedly northwest Pakistan, Lebanon and Gaza.

In spite of the billions of dollars spent and being spent to reduce the threat to Americans from abroad, U.S. policy has served as an enabler of terrorists in at least these five venues. All are a lot worse in that regard in 2008 than they were in the wake of 9/11 and America's immediate response in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002.

The other really painful fact is that we are easily as vulnerable now as we were prior to 9/11. It is -- and should be -- the nature of American society that we do not live in a fortress. How horrible would it be to live in a society where, to enter a shopping center, hospital or church -- wherever people gather -- we would have to be searched repeatedly as we are when we travel by air?

A quick reading of last week's news underlines just how vulnerable we are as a people to violent, murderous attacks in public places. An angry armed man goes into a city council meeting in Kirkwood, Mo., and kills five. An armed nursing student at a college in Baton Rouge, La., kills two and then herself. Now, let's suppose that both were suicide bombers, wrapped with explosives, walking deep into a hospital, church, shopping center or busy office building and self-detonating? America's media would transmit news of such an attack instantly, terrifying the population.

Adm. McConnell said that al-Qaida is now concentrating on training new Western recruits, including Americans, to integrate into American society and attack domestic targets.

Fortifying public facilities and tormenting Americans in the name of greater safety is unrealistic to the point of being infeasible, not to mention that it would result in a country not fit to live in. It is ironic in Pittsburgh that our tunnels and hospitals are wide open. It is our precious sports venues -- PNC Park, Heinz Field -- where one is checked before entering.

So what should be done? The approach that has been almost entirely ignored in recent years is to try to reduce the reasons for terrorists to want to attack domestic targets in the United States. I believe in reasonable precautions taken within the United States but reject utterly as unrealistic the "fortress America" approach. I have lived in totalitarian societies. That approach might look superficially as if it works, but it doesn't. In the long run Americans would find it intolerable. Remember our Revolution? Remember most Americans' revulsion at slavery?

So how do we make people hate us less and no longer want to attack us at home?

• Get off the kick of feeling as though we have the right -- or worse, the duty -- to decide how every other country in the world governs itself. There is no reason whatsoever why the United States should continue to expand its military spending and station more U.S. forces abroad. The proposed next year's budget for the military is 5 percent higher than last year's, which doesn't even include nuclear weapons and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

I have repeatedly made it clear that I believe the war in Iraq should end now, with incremental withdrawals of U.S. forces beginning immediately and continuing until we have no military presence in that country.

• Address the other issues -- in addition to other countries' bitterness at our prescriptive approach to their governance -- that cause them to hate us. Preeminent among these is the now 60-year-old Israeli-Palestinian face-off. That struggle is the No. 1 issue in what is becoming an almost Crusade-like battle, almost religious in its fervor, between "the West" and "the Muslim world." I put these two terms in quotes because both are imprecise, neither grouping is internally coherent, both include a wide variety in their composition and both have the unfortunate characteristic of generally being defined in people's minds by their most extreme elements.

The Israeli-Palestinian issue is not hard to address credibly. All parties understand the general terms of an agreement. Call it "the road map," "land for peace," whatever it takes to end up with Israel living at peace among its neighbors and the Palestinians having a country. The United States and the rest of the world also possess the levers and influence necessary to push the parties to end this conflict.

• Make a conscious decision as Americans to deal with our own, serious problems as opposed to spending our money and blood on other people's problems. The list of domestic troubles is long and painful. It is now being joined by our collapsing economy, underlined by repeated examples of our collapsing infrastructure. (The Birmingham Bridge has only slipped, not fallen into the Monongahela. We were lucky.)

Two of the problems at home to start with are a messed up, expensive, non-inclusive health-care system and a dependence on fossil fuels that is expensive, that makes us dangerously vulnerable and that is extremely destructive of the environment.

Now, are these issues more compelling than Iraq, Afghanistan, North and South Waziristan, Kosovo and Darfur? You tell me.