Playing into Al Qaeda's hands

Josh makes an important point this morning about the strategic error of our Iraqi policy. As James Fallows wrote last year in the Atlantic, according to Al Qaeda documents seized after 9-11, bin Laden's plan was to get the US bogged down in a quagmire to drain not only our finances, but also our resolve.

The Fallows article is behind the subscriber wall, but Tom Hilton has an excellent post about the Fallows article, and the premise of the article, that is really not to be missed. The crux of the post is that Al Qaeda operates by provoking responses from those it attacks that do more damage than Al Qaeda could ever hope to accomplish.

Here is the crux of Hilton's argument,

I don't think anyone who's paying attention can honestly argue that Bush's reaction to 9/11 hasn't harmed the nation. In the article, Fallows describes some of the ways in which the response to al Qaeda has helped them and damaged us (more excerpts are below the fold; the whole article is well worth reading): the strain on the military, the recruitment value of Iraq for the jihadists, the staggering economic cost (of the war, and of excessive security measures), the near-total loss of American 'soft power', the closing of what has historically been one of the most open societies in the world.

There is other damage that he barely touches on, most noteworthy of which is the erosion of constitutional rule. At what point is America no longer America? At what point, as we jettison principle after principle, does the United States as such cease to exist?