The Scorecard
By 
I ruminate a little on the relationship between 9/11 and the Wars on Terror over at 1945:
The chief and immediate effect of the September 11 attacks was to shift the focus of US diplomacy and grand strategy from great power competition (the priority of the Bush administration for its first eight months) to a fight against the sources of terrorism. The administration, for better and mostly for worse, determined that the critical threat to the United States was a nexus of “rogue states” and terrorist organizations, using Weapons of Mass Destruction to attack the American homeland and US installations abroad.
That fateful decision represented a catastrophic error of statecraft, binding the United States to a pair of wars that would take the greater part of two decades to escape. Costly and destructive, these wars would distort US politics and defense policy in ways that endure and remain hard to understand.
Dan, Cheryl and I recorded a pod yesterday about the international repercussions of the 9/11 attacks that I expect will post on Monday. If you haven’t listened to the pod Paul and I recorded please do so!