After 9/11, the U.S. Got Almost Everything Wrong

 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/after-911-everything-wrong-war-terror/620008/

 A mission to rid the world of “terror” and “evil” led America in tragic directions.

 At the time, some commentators politely noted the danger of tilting at such nebulous concepts, but a stunned American public appeared to crave a bold response imbued with a higher purpose. As the journalist Robert Draper writes in To Start a War, his new history of the Bush administration’s lies, obfuscations, and self-delusions that led from Afghanistan into Iraq, “In the after-shocks of 9/11, a reeling America found itself steadied by blunt-talking alpha males whose unflappable, crinkly-eyed certitude seemed the only antidote to nationwide panic.”