Word: terrorists
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...answer to that query still seemed unresolved. According to a TIME/Discovery Channel poll taken on the eve of the anniversary, nearly 70% of Americans believed the war against terrorism would not be won within 10 years. But looked at from the vantage point of 2031--three decades after the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington--the debate is over. Thirty years later, the Great War for Democracy has been won. And not many people in 2006 would have predicted the winner...
...execution of it was fatally flawed. Far from reducing conflict in the Middle East, forcible democratization turned out to have just the opposite effect, unleashing violent centrifugal forces that were beyond American power to control. By focusing its efforts on rogue states, the U.S. ignored the fact that the terrorists' most important area of activity was not the Middle East but stable, prosperous, democratic Western Europe. And while a war against a rogue regime was as asymmetric as a turkey shoot, the same could not be said of a war against diffuse terrorist networks. It became fashionable in the years...
...those reasons, it was hardly surprising that, by the time of the fifth anniversary, many experts argued that the U.S. reaction to 9/11 had failed to eliminate the terrorist threat and instead had made the world a more dangerous place. Bush's defenders, meanwhile, insisted that the President's strategy was still the one that would ultimately win the war on terrorism. Only history could determine which side would be proved right...
...also a dream come true for America's enemies. Osama bin Laden, the terrorist leader behind the attacks, exulted at his triumph. "Praise be to God," he declared in a proclamation issued less than a month after 9/11. "What the United States tastes today is a very small thing compared to what we have tasted for tens of years...
Iraq's disintegration was the harbinger of a wider regional meltdown. The irony was that terrorism thrived more readily in the new Middle Eastern democracies than in the bad old dictatorships. It was no coincidence that, outside Iraq, the terrorist organizations causing the most trouble in the region were operating out of southern Lebanon and the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank. In all those places, elections had been held. Yet those who won them--Hizballah in Lebanon and Hamas in the occupied territories--were historically terrorist organizations...