The President's attitude on cooperation with the 9-11 Commission was just the opposite of what it should have been. As Commander-in-Chief, he should have worked with the Commission to get at the heart of the problem, with the idea of preventing future attacks. Instead, for a year, the White House resisted the investigative Commission and then stonewalled it for another year."

Now is a good time for Americans to pause and consider our progress in what the Bush administration chooses to call the war on terror. Osama bin Laden remains at large three years after the attacks of September 11, the war in Iraq has reached a kind of stasis of escalating violence matched by an erosion of our ability to control events there, new crises loom with other members of the "axis of evil" defined by President Bush in January 2002, and the President's reelection rules out the likelihood of any sudden change in American policy. With suspense on that point ended for the moment, we ought to weigh what we have learned from the linked disasters of September 11 and the war in Iraq, and what we should fear or expect next as American plans and facts on the ground sort themselves out in the Middle East.