It pains me to think that we are becoming victims of our own success when fighting the war on terror. America, and more specifically New York, got lucky recently when a car bomb left in Times Square didn’t go off and kill anyone.

The bomber, Faisal Shahzad, was an American citizen who had lived in the U.S. for a while, attended a university here where he received a master’s degree, had a pretty good job, a wife, kids and a decent house.

Then he went to Pakistan for six months where it turns out he was training with the Taliban.  I don’t get it, but I do get the trend.

We like to think terrorists are uneducated and backwards, and “if they only got to know us” they wouldn’t be terrorists.  But recent events point to the contrary.

Writing about Shahzad, syndicated columnist Mark Steyn rightly notes:  “He’s not an exception; he’s the rule. The panty bomber is a wealthy Nigerian who lived in a London flat worth 2 million pounds. Kafeel Ahmed, who died driving a flaming SUV into the concourse of Glasgow Airport, was president of the Islamic Society of Queen’s University in Belfast. Omar Sheikh, the man who beheaded the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl, was a graduate of the London School of Economics. Mohamed Atta was a Hamburg University engineering student. Osama bin Laden went to summer school at Oxford. Educated men. Westernized men. Men who could be pulling down big six-figure salaries anywhere on the planet - were it not that their Islamic identity trumps everything else: elite education, high-paying job, Western passport.”

I think this is a sobering reality and one we better come to terms with quickly because we as a nation haven’t.

We also have to get rid of our other crutch.  The woefully inaccurate “lone nut job” that the government and national media are so quick to label every terrorist who tries to attack us.

Lone nut jobs don’t train in Pakistan for six months, then fly back to the U.S. and try to blow up Times Square.  He even managed to park near the Viacom building, home to Comedy Central, the channel which airs “South Park,” the cartoon that recently offended Muslims by mocking Muhammad.

It’s a good thing Shahzad bought the wrong type of fertilizer, didn’t open the valve on the propane tank and that street vendor saw the vehicle and called the police.

Unfortunately, it probably won’t be long until someone else sets off a successful bomb.  One could argue that U.S. Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan who shot 13 of his fellow servicemen launched a successful attack.

He also was wrongly labeled as a lone wolf who snapped, when the truth is he was in regular e-mail contact with the American-born, Yemeni-based cleric Ayman al-Awlaki, who is an extremist.

I’m afraid that we are going to be awakened from our national slumber by boom.  The only questions are where will it take place, and how big will it be.

The “I know where the war on terror is, it’s on TV” mentality has got to stop.  Political correctness isn’t going to win us any friends among those who want to kill Americans.  Time for the truth no matter how unpleasant.