9/11 anniversary comments

Richard Cohen will make people angry with this column, but he's right: Bin Laden has won a victory. The US is mired in Afghanistan AND Iraq. If the de facto Administration hadn't decided -- on false and wrong premises -- to go into Iraq, we might have been in better shape in Afghanistan. Instead, we have two places where we have failed to achieve our goals.

De facto VP Cheney still took advantage of the day to again make the false analogy between now in Iraq and the 1930s in Europe, saying "We have no intention of ignoring or appeasing history's latest gang of fanatics."

As we remember that terrible day, realize this: practically all the goodwill the world showed us that day has been squandered because of an Administration that seized on that excuse and, grotesquely over-reacting exactly as the terrorists hoped we would, subsequently invaded Iraq, approved torture and indefinite detention and arrests without warrants, decided to spy on Americans without warrants, and the rest of it. All that, and they haven't captured Bin Laden. What a record.