sorry if I offended you, Time, but what you say isn't true.
Like the Soviets and the British before them, we lost in Afghanistan. Which is what anyone with more than a passing knowledge of history would have predicted although once the direction that we were going to take was clear I certainly hoped for the best.
In Iraq we merely succeeded in overthrowing the Sunni minority that had kept the Shiite majority in check- basically giving a gift to Iran.
If one accepts the conventional view of 9/11 then OBL's purpose was to draw the US into the ME and bleed it, which was accomplished spectacularly.
Actually this is all worse than it might appear on the surface. With a massively overleveraged economy and weak demand, our economy requires huge deficits in order to keep the balls in the air or risks a severe deflationary liquidation.
It ain't good but in the spirit of christian teaching I'll choose feeding and clothing people (even though I'm not sure that political liberalism qualifies as personal charity and even if people use their food stamps to buy coca cola or sit on their couches collecting unemployment) rather than support a permanent warfare state where the most compelling purpose is to keep asset values elevated.
I know that it is bad for business to not be reverent on 9/11 or to not have a Support Our Troops ribbon on the truck as we're told patriotic folks should. But seriously, at some point we have to first accept that we lost and second that the whole thing had questionable moral standing to begin with.
Which, by the way, is in no way the fault of the people who served.
