Matt Yglesias has one of the best 9/11 anniversary posts I’ve read anywhere. A lot of readers may miss the best parts since they’re hidden in the extended entry, but you should definitely go read the whole thing :

The nation — not only the “average American” but the permanent governing class here in Washington — remains astoundingly ignorant about obviously relevant things. The national conversation is stuck on an astoundingly naive debate about whether “they” hate us because of our policies or because of who we are. Who “they” are seems barely examined. That “they” might — like all the actual people I know — be subject to complicated motivations that are not entirely transparent even to themselves, seems barely to be considered. People have almost no idea what al-Qaeda actually is, and the sort of people I work with — the sort of people whose job it is to be aware of what is known and what is disputed among the experts — have almost no familiarity with the contours of the controversy. People — well-informed people even — are wracked with confusions between Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Their names aren’t even really similar. I only learned a few weeks ago that “Abu” is not a first name at all, but rather something akin to a Russian patronymic working in reverse. The fact that October 2001 through February 2002 proved not to be the disaster many feared has lulled the nation into a false sense of complacency. People don’t realize that 9-11 has, in fact, been followed up by a fairly massive wave of violence, albeit violence that’s largely occurred outside the United States of America.

Don Rumsfeld wrote a while back that we not only don’t know if we’re succeeding in the war on terrorism, we don’t even have metrics of success. And he was right. We get jammed up in a conversation about whether the GWOT is “really” a war, and don’t talk about the fact that whatever it is (I think “war” is a serviceable term) we don’t really know who it’s directed against. We don’t know what we’re trying to do, we don’t know if we’re succeeding at doing it, and we have barely any idea how we’re going to figure it out. We’re in the midst of an impassioned political campaign in which I — like many others — have become, somewhat against or wills and intentions, a fairly active (albeit fairly unimportant) participant. But whoever wins will still be faced with the reality that ignorance — public, official, and elite — is massive. Confusion is still as widespread as it was on 9-12-01 but back then we at least felt confused. Like Socrates we knew, to some extent at least, what we did not know. Now the worst are filled with passionate intensity. The ratio of unknown unknowns to known unknowns is frighteningly high.

You should also check out this post by Jesse (from Pandagon) and this one by Juan Cole.