9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed.

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

48% : The backlash against Muslims, against immigrants crossing the southern border and against protesters rallying for racial justice was strengthened by the open-ended nature of the global war on terror.
46% : In Ackerman's vivid telling -- his prose can be hyperbolic, even if his arguments are not -- the war is not just far away in Iraq or Afghanistan, in Yemen or Syria, but it's happening here, with mass surveillance, militarized law enforcement and the rebranding of immigration as a threat to the nation's security rather than a cornerstone of its identity. "
44% : Iraq, meanwhile, needed to make progress on national reconciliation (in a country already awash in sectarian bloodletting), boost domestic security (even though the report deems the Iraqi army a mess and the Iraqi police worse) and deliver social services (even as the report concludes that the government was failing to adequately provide electricity, drinking water, sewage services and education).
43% : Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine a travel ban against people from Muslim-majority countries.
42% : The report calls for a "diplomatic offensive" to gain international support for Iraq, to persuade Iran and Syria to respect Iraq's territory and sovereignty, and to commit to "a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts."

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.