What national unity?(geopolitics)

Four years after the worst attack on American soil, we are still not so sure about our policy in Afghanistan, and we are even more divided over Iraq. Hysteria mounts against the Patriot Act. We even bicker about the proposed Ground Zero museum in New York City.

What happened to the supposed national unity that grew out of our ordeal?

The problem is not entirely that Americans are being killed almost daily in a continuing war. Our costs in the Middle East have been high, yet we have so far lost about two thirds the number of Americans who perished on September 11, the first day of the war.

Few Americans waking up on September 12, 2001 would have believed that just four years later the Taliban and Saddam Hussein would be gone, Afghans and Iraqis would be living with governments they elected, the Syrians would be forced out of Lebanon by angry Beirut voters, elections would have taken place on the West Bank after the demise of Ararat, all U.S. troops would be out of Saudi Arabia, and political reform would be on the rise in the Gulf States. All without another terrorist attack on the United States.

But a chasm had opened in our increasingly affluent and leisured society well before this war began. A number of Americans had come to believe that all peoples and cultures and nations had grown together, and that war was a thing of the past (or, at worst, something to be solved by a salvo of cruise missiles or bombing from 30,000 feet). The United Nations, the European Union, and the World Court were said to be the institutions of the future that would guide measures to eradicate poverty, disease, and violence.

September 11 destroyed those pretensions. The Taliban and Saddam Hussein merely laughed at the United Nations. Europe, far from becoming a beacon of tolerance and progress, continued to stagger under the weight of economic stagnation, moral ambiguity, and unassimilated Muslim immigrants.

Nonetheless, only about six out of ten Americans saw September 11 for what it was: the inevitable wages of decades of appeasing terrorism and radical Islam, and an unprovoked attack that could be addressed only by military action. The rest viewed our enemy not as an ideology engendered by ...