A couple of somewhat different angles on where we are, seven years after the attack, from Victor Davis Hanson:

While many rightly point to lapses in the conduct of the Iraq war, faulty intelligence, and wrongheaded emphasis on supposed arsenals of WMDs rather than the casus belli outlined in the 23 writs authorized by the Congress, few can answer a more existential question: Had we not met, defeated, and humiliated tens of thousands of jihadists on the battlefields of Iraq, where else might we have inflicted such a terrible defeat on our enemies –given the nuclear sanctuary of Pakistan, the bellicose governments of Iran and Syria, and the duplicity of the Gulf monarchies? And if we had not killed, captured, scattered, and turned our enemies abroad, how then might we have prevented them from coming back here to attack us at home? And are the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, as in the past, aiding anti-American terrorists, or helping to hunt them down?

The truth is, we chased al-Qaeda from Iraq and Afghanistan and it is now in lunatic fashion chasing Danish cartoonists, European novelists, and opera producers as it cuts the fingers off smokers, tries to cover up the genitalia of animals, and looks for the mentally ill to strap on suicide belts.

Long after Jacques Chirac, Michael Moore, Gerhard Schroeder, and Cindy Sheehan have come, gone, and nearly disappeared, a General David Petraeus and thousands of American soldiers and diplomats like him remain. George W. Bush is reviled, in part because of an inability to articulate what the war against terror was, and what it was for. But Bush hatred has been reduced to a sort of politically correct trinket, worn around the neck of the clannish critics as a reminder of the President’s ineptness in expression or supposedly dangerous views — without examining what others might have done to achieve the same results of achieving freedom from further attack.

And from Robert Spencer:

Seven years have passed since the mujahedin murdered nearly 3,000 office workers in what was a clear declaration of war against the United States, and the situation is more muddled than ever.

Some think, as I noted yesterday, that the “war on terror” is in its final stages: Al-Qaeda is in disarray, with even its foremost theorists questioning its methodology. Unfortunately, there is less to that than meets the eye.

Some think that the “war on terror” never existed at all, but was and is merely a concoction of the Bush Administration that would enable it to carry out its imperialist designs.

Neither view can comprehend the prospect of a man in Britain plotting mass murder and explaining: “We are doing this in order to gain the pleasure of our Lord and Allah loves us to die and kill in his path.”

Both major political parties in America — and, indeed, virtually all national political figures — as well as all the principal spokesmen of both the liberal and conservative mainstream media remain firmly and unquestioningly committed to the proposition that Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists.

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