ALL CONSENSUS REQUIRED WAS A JUDAS GOAT:

Myth and Reality After 9/11: Ten years later, we've reached a bipartisan consensus. (Victor Davis Hanson, 9/08/11, National Review)

Another post-9/11 myth assured us that George W. Bush foolishly squandered a rare national unity by enacting unlawful and unnecessary homeland-security measures and starting wasteful and unwinnable wars. The myth seems to suggest that if only we had not gone into Iraq or opened Guantanamo, we would still be at peace and, left and right alike, flying American flags from our cars' antennas.

But we know that this theory is largely a fable. From 2001 to 2008, almost every domestic and foreign security expert assured us that the next 9/11 was not a matter of "if," but only of "when." Yet ten years later, there has not been a single comparable terrorist attack, despite dozens of foiled efforts to shoot and blow up Americans. What happened?

The Patriot Act, renditions, tribunals, preventive detention, new bothersome security measures, and the use of Predator drones have all weakened al-Qaeda and have made it difficult to attack Americans at home. For all the acrimony over Afghanistan and Iraq, tens of thousands of jihadists were killed abroad, and consensual governments that fight terrorists still survive in place of dictatorships.

And where now are the likes of Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Moveon.org, Code Pink, and the entire anti-war movement that for years dominated the news, assuring us that we had lost our freedoms at home and caused only mayhem abroad?

The truth is they mostly dropped out of the news when Barack Obama was elected president. Apparently these loud megaphones had all along been more interested in partisan politics than principled criticism. In one of the strangest turnabouts in modern political history, fierce anti-war and anti-administration critic Barack Obama, upon taking the office of the presidency, either embraced or expanded almost all of the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism policies.

Obama also left mostly unchanged U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, and joined a third Middle East war by bombing Libya. Indeed, Vice President Joe Biden boasted that a calm Iraq could be one of the administration's "greatest achievements." In 2012, there will be no Obama reelection commercials bragging about the promised closure of Guantanamo Bay, but plenty taking credit for killing bin Laden inside Pakistan, a country where we have increased targeted drone assassinations fivefold since 2009.

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