Perhaps inevitably, that sense didn’t last for long. We might have lost our innocence and learned something about the world, but we did not suddenly become wise. Americans were facing the first case in a generation in which a chain of events that started overseas shook and changed all of our lives. It’s impossible to expect that we would respond by leaping to a new moral plane, or that we would immediately grasp the complexity of the global forces that had just come to harm us. Nor were we remotely prepared for the idea of modern asymmetric warfare.
