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I don’t mean to be harsh.  Once somebody has worked themselves into a panic over something, the panic is real and so are the feelings that flow from it.  But it is the case that we worked ourselves into that panic.  And our panic is what enabled the ongoing Bush-Cheney disaster – the “everything” that changed.

While one America fought, another shopped until the debt-driven spree ended in mayhem; and, to their horror, Americans discovered they could no longer cushion their declining incomes by borrowing against the once rising — now crashing — assets of their homes. Their last coping mechanism had collapsed.

None of this fosters forgiveness. Rather, it feeds a quest for scapegoats — Wall Street or Wahhabis.

Against these backdrops, Islam is easily manipulated by those who would cast it as enemy. Its very effervescence — that of the youngest of the great monotheistic religions — and its conservative values, especially on women’s rights, are fodder. So are its political expression as an ordering framework for society and the contentious concept of jihad.

“The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.” Did that assurance mean more to white Americans coming from someone who looked like them?

Xenophobia and racism still abounded, but the lid stayed on the pot. Perhaps when Republicans held both the White House and Congress, conservatives weren’t sweating a thing; for them, people of color, along with all our white liberal friends, were lumped together in one misery-loves-company fringe. But now that the tables have turned, conservatives have positioned themselves as aggrieved victims.

has the most irrational breed of 9/11 payback emerged precisely because we elected an African-American president whose middle name — the name of cousins of mine — has turned into an H-word slur? A commander in chief whom the most misled and confused perceive in cartoon cahoots with terrorists, or at least as their religion-mate? As if that weren’t enough, take last year’s Fort Hood gunman, add a helping of the would-be Times Square bomber and top it off with “ground zero mosque” — and voilà, a boiling hot summer of anti-Islamic assault. Suddenly, anyone with skin as dark as President Obama’s could be a “secret Muslim,” and any Muslim must surely be a not-so-secret terrorist.

Every day, I lose America and America loses me, more and more.

those refugees -- or at least fantasy versions of them -- played in Donald Trump’s full-throated, successful pitch for the presidency? What, in the end, might be the cost of that?

The tens of millions of people displaced in their own countries or sent as refugees fleeing across any border in sight?

How could you factor in the way those masses of uprooted peoples of the Greater Middle East and Africa are unsettling other parts of the planet?

for instance, helped fuel an expanding set of right-wing “populist” movements that threaten to tear Europe apart.

the hundreds of thousands of dead?

America’s never-ending twenty-first-century conflicts were triggered by the decision of George W. Bush and his top officials to instantly define their response to attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center by a tiny group of jihadis as a “war”; then to proclaim it nothing short of a “Global War on Terror”; and finally to invade and occupy first Afghanistan and then Iraq, with dreams of dominating the Greater Middle East -- and ultimately the planet -- as no other imperial power had ever done

I’ve never forgotten the 2002 warning issued by Amr Moussa, then head of the Arab League. An invasion of Iraq would, he predicted that September, “open the gates of hell.”

It wasn’t just the US military that, in the spring of 2003, passed through those gates to hell. In our own way, we all did.

Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett -- now possess as much wealth as the bottom half of the US population, of 160 million Americans,

How, for instance, could I begin to explain to them the ways in which, in these years, money flowed ever upward into the pockets of the immensely wealthy and then down again into what became one-percent elections that would finally ensconce a billionaire and his family in the White House?

none of this would have been imaginable if, in the aftermath of 9/11, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney & Co. hadn’t felt the urge to launch the wars that led us through those gates of hell. Their soaring geopolitical dreams of global domination proved to be nightmares of the first order. They imagined a planet unlike any in the previous half millennium of imperial history, in which a single power would basically dominate everything

Colonel McCall is the fourth judge to preside at the Guantánamo court in the conspiracy case against Mr. Mohammed and the four other men who are accused of helping to plot the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and the Pentagon 20 years ago.

He has been a military judge for just two years, and was recently promoted to colonel, making him the youngest and least experienced of the judges who have overseen the case.