The United States scored a great military and diplomatic victory in Afghanistan. It drove out a hostile regime. It dealt a serious, though not fatal, blow to the al-Qaeda terrorist network and assembled a coalition against radical Islam that stretched from North Africa to East Asia. But the Bush administration now appears poised to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Once the guns stopped firing in Kandahar, it reverted to the self-centered foreign policy that it had practiced before September 11. This is nowhere more apparent than in U.S. relations with the Israelis and the Palestinians.

There is widespread agreement that the September 11
terrorist attacks against the United States ushered in a new stage of world
history, one distinct from the last 50 or 100 years. Secretary of State Colin
Powell has referred to the period since 9-11 as the "post-post-Cold War." New
York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has described it as "World War III."
Many others, citing Samuel Huntington's theory, have portrayed the war as a
"clash of civilizations" that has superseded the Cold War clash of ideologies.
The war, writes political scientist Louis Rene Beres, is "a civilizational
struggle in which a resurgent medievalism now seeks to bring fear, paralysis and