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Taking Stock of the Forever War. Just finished reading this from the September 11th issue of the NY Times magazine. Yeah, running months behind on the magazine as usual, but it is an especially lengthy article as well. I’m mostly surprised that it took so long for a piece like this to be published in the Times.

Four years after we watched the towers fall, Americans have not succeeded in “ridding the world of evil.” We have managed to show ourselves, our friends and most of all our enemies the limits of American power. Instead of fighting the real war that was thrust upon us on that incomprehensible morning four years ago, we stubbornly insisted on fighting a war of the imagination, an ideological struggle that we defined not by frankly appraising the real enemy before us but by focusing on the mirror of our own obsessions. And we have finished – as the escalating numbers of terrorist attacks, the grinding Iraq insurgency, the overstretched American military and the increasing political dissatisfaction at home show – by fighting precisely the kind of war they wanted us to fight.