Seventeen years ago, Osama bin Laden’s terrorist minions, using hijacked passenger planes as weapons, killed 2,977 people in a single awful raid on the United States. The nation observed 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3000 people on American soil in 2001. In hindsight, we never should have expected the war on terror to unify the United States, as the two world wars or, to a large extent, the Cold War did. Those conflicts pitted the United States against nation-states whose defeat — or, in the case of the Soviet Union, containment — could be intelligibly defined and realistically anticipated. A war on terror, in short, offers politicians, and the public, opportunities to fight over emotionally fraught but hard-to-solve tactical dilemmas.

Source: thestar September 11, 2018 12:11 UTC