Jim Wright, one of my go-to bloggers for intelligent analysis, writes, with bitter sarcasm, that we “won” after 9/11.  But for people for whom sarcasm is not a native language…

We didn’t win. When the first soldiers were deployed to Iraq, a country which had nothing to do with 9/11, we lost. When the first suspected terrorist was sent to a CIA black site, we lost. When we brought our torture in-house at Abu Ghraib, we lost. When the first detainees walked through the gates of Gitmo– especially the first detainees that were caught up by a hysterical dragnet flung far and wide, catching terrorists and innocents who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time — we lost. When we bombed Iraq and Afghanistan and killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians, we lost. And when our drones missed their targets and killed civilians whose only crime was to want to celebrate a wedding, we lost.
 
When we first decided that principles such as the dignity of man and and the evil of torture were not fixed in stone but subject to whatever political exigencies swirled around our heads, we lost.
 
When we lost our soul as a country, we lost.
 
The terrorists, on the other hand, won.
They won big time.
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