As we ramp up to a weekend that will flood our televisions and radiowaves with retrospective specials on the 9/11 attacks, America's opinion-makers are vying to define the meaning of those horrors and the decade since.

But instead of using this moment to reconstruct narratives affirming our successes and clarifying the many lessons we only learned through error, many among the opinion-making class have dug in their heels, cherry-picking from ten years of evidence to support whatever position on counterterrorism they staked out on September 12, 2001.

Commentators from the right continue to harp on the very simplistic logical fallacy that because there has not been a devastating attack since 9/11, EVERY aspect of the government's response was a success. They are nearly as eager to point out, too, that because the Obama administration has yet to renounce all of its predecessor's policies, it must have judged them all to be effective:
Charles Krauthammer propagates the fallacy with gusto:

10 years, no second attack (which everyone assumed would come within months). That testifies to the other great achievement of the decade: the defensive anti-terror apparatus hastily constructed from scratch after 9/11 by President Bush, and then continued by President Obama. Continued why? Because it worked.

John Yoo defends his team's record even against the price of tens of thousands of American casualties:

In the last decade, our nation has certainly paid a price in the lives of the brave men and women who have defended us. But who would say, after 10 years, that it wasn't worth it to keep our nation safe?"

...and also interprets the Obama administration's counterterrorism as continuous with Bush's:

"reality and political opposition forced the [Obama] administration to return to many of its predecessor's core terrorism policies."

The Council on Foreign Relations' Max Boot also fails Logic-101, supporting both the fallacy that a single outcome proves the causality of multiple antecedent policies and the fallacy that subsequent failure to do away with any one of those policies indicates acceptance of all of them:

"A near absence of terrorist incidents in the United States since 9/11 points to the successes of the Bush Administration's counterterrorism measures that once stirred controversy but now have bipartisan acceptance."

Michael Gerson is perhaps boldest in his case for the continuity of the Bush and Obama approaches when he states:

"A decade beyond Sept. 11, the Bush Doctrine has been adopted by the Obama administration and vindicated by events."

By Gerson's lights, the fact that Obama has chosen a course of responsible exit from Iraq and Afghanistan, and honored America's commitment to its NATO alliance by taking a decidedly-backseat role in the ousting of Qaddafi, indicates his full-blown endorsement of aggressively militarist democracy promotion.

Commentators from the left, meanwhile, have their own reasons for closely comparing the policies of Bush and Obama. (To avoid charges of drawing false equivalencies, I should note that the rhetorical flourishes of these commentators pale in comparison to the flights from logic coming from folks like Krauthammer and Yoo.)
Having spent the early part of the decade vigilantly defending civil liberties against real and counterproductive encroachments by an overzealous Bush administration, they show little hesitation in skewering Democrats for failing to enact the entire agenda they campaigned on.

Robert Wright, for example, writes of the whole counterproductive War on Terror :

"Certainly President Obama seems bent on sustaining it. In addition to authorizing the assassination of al-Awlaki (an American citizen, by the way, in theory guaranteed due process by our Constitution), the President has massively expanded drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and he recently extended them to Somalia, even as they continue in Yemen."

He calls on the President to:

"Quit doing the kinds of things that have made so many in the Muslim world hate the United States. Get our troops out of Muslim lands, stop firing drones into their countries."

Elizabeth Anderson concurs with Wright's lament that Obama merely continues Bush's policies:

"He escalated the war in Afghanistan. He failed to close the prison in Guantanamo Bay, move terrorism trials out of military commissions to civilian courts, end extraordinary rendition, or prosecute Bush Administration officials who ordered torture. … In targeting Muslim cleric and accused Al Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki for assassination, he has affirmed Bush’s claim that the president can order the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen, even outside any battlefield context. Overall, Obama’s record on executive power and civil liberties diverges little from that of his predecessor. In certain respects it is even worse…"

Wright's and Anderson's complaints not only exaggerate the continuity between Bush and Obama -- neither employing drone strikes nor properly resourcing an ongoing counterinsurgency/institution-building mission in Afghanistan is nearly tantamount to launching a ground invasion of Iraq on flimsy pretenses without an inkling of an exit strategy -- they exaggerate the continuity between the national security policies of Bush's first and second terms. If Obama can be faulted for not turning 180 degrees from Bush's initial War on Terror policies, that is largely because

Bush's government already turned at least 90 degrees from them after 2003.

A few outlets have at least acknowledged that there is not total continuity between Bush's and Obama's counterterrorism policies -- The Economist, for one:

"…the Bush Administration rode roughshod over cherished civil liberties. Congress, the courts, and a new president eventually pushed back, but not all the way."

But the Economists' view of the retreat from Bush-era policies is only partially correct. The courts did push back on the Bush Administration's designs for Military Commissions, forcing the tribunals to approximate more closely the traditional criminal courts of the American Constitution. And President Obama did issue an Executive Order banning the use of 'enhanced' interrogation tactics that were already abandoned. But, Congress, for its part, has done precious little on any of these fronts. It has provided episodic and toothless oversight of executive counterterrorism programs, greenlighted ineffective security policies agencies have not even asked for, and even prevented DoD and DoJ prosecutors -- against their preferences -- from transferring terror defendants to Article III Courts (citing their responsibility to protect their constituents from "movie-plot" attacks on the trial venues).

Who Really Ended the War on Terror?

What is missed in all this coverage -- as my colleagues and I have argued in The ATLANTIC -- is that most of the retreat from Bush's rights-abusing policies was initiated by the security establishment itself, because the policies did not work.

The FBI, TSA, and ICE walked back from ethnic profiling policies because they caught no terrorists and alienated potentially useful collaborators. The CIA ended the 'enhanced' interrogation program in favor of better-performing methods. And, for every military prosecutor fighting for increased prerogatives and decreased due process for terror suspects, a military defense attorney has been fighting to defend Article III Constitutional rights on the grounds that they make our legal system more effective and legitimate.

Though Anderson is right that the NSA's domestic surveillance programs are ongoing, plenty of people are waking up to the fact that they don't actually work. The FBI has complained for some time that the programs inundate them with useless leads. The National Academies of Science released a thorough review concluding that the programs' success relied on data unlikely to exist, and probably only drove terrorists further underground. And a joint report from Inspectors General for the DOD, DOJ, CIA, NSA, and DNI cited interviews with users of the program who could turn up no example in which the program led to the foiling of a terrorist plot. Officials in charge of the programs, dazzled by the illusion of future potential for the programs have so far failed to appreciate their fundamental limits. (Given Americans' faith in technology, a full repudiation of the programs is not likely to come until politicians' constituencies understand that they are useless, too.)

As for the second counterterrorism policy used to draw equivalence between Bush and Obama -- drone strikes -- they are far less disruptive to civilian populations than ground invasions and occupations, and far different from and preferable to the conventional war both hawks and doves have dismally attempted to conflate them with. The question is no longer over whether to use drones as opposed to war to combat terrorists, but whether to use drones instead of daring capture and arrest missions. Given the status quo policy allowing the President, with National Security Council approval, to target American citizens abroad for killing, civil libertarian advocates might be wisest attempting to tame and legitimize the practice.

To be clear, all things being equal, the dynamics of the struggle between states and terrorists play out in such a way that it is praobably always better to deny terrorists' their preferred status as warriors by treating them as common criminals. Doing so highlights the legitimacy of the state and 'Rule of Law' while diminishing aspiring world historical figures to petty losers. And putting terror suspects through traditional due processes, despite baseless assertions to the contrary, actually engenders more cooperation than treating them in harsh adversarial fashion.

When American law enforcement cannot safely get their hands on a terror suspect, there should probably be some formal process for confirming to the world that they are bent on mass-murder before summarily executing them. Whether that process includes an arraignment and/or trial by satellite, a publication of evidence and invitation for response, or something else is a question that civil libertarians should engage.

Ten years on, our current approach to counterterrorism is not perfect. But the approach we used immediately after 9/11 was far worse and that should not be forgotten. Policies targeting Muslims with suspicion (and (sometimes accidental) abuse and death) alienated Muslims allies inside and outside our borders, bolstering al Qaeda's recruitment call. Surveillance powers expanded to allow spying on innocent Americans flooded our intelligence community with yet more dots they were ill-equipped to connect, sending them on thousands of goose-chases tracking false leads. So-called 'enhanced' interrogation only enhanced the speed with which America's reputation declined. To date, there has been no credible evidence showing that those coercive tactics generated useful intelligence. And the overbroad use of military detentions and military trials has weakened our 'Rule of Law' while failing to successfully determine the guilt or innocence of hundreds of men. These policies were abject failures. And most of them have long since been abandoned or significantly curtailed.

Despite all of this, we have enjoyed a decade without a single American civilian killed by Hirabi (AKA Jihadi) terrorists on US soil. The reasons we haven't been attacked are fairly simple:

1) There aren't that many terrorists. (And there will be even fewer if we allow al Qaeda's popularity to continue to plummet.)
2) We have gotten lucky in a few cases that terrorists were incompetent.
3) Our counterterrorism operations -- based on old-fashioned police work, community tips (many from Muslims), traditional targeted surveillance, and foreign intelligence -- have netted almost every possible terror plotter in our country.
4) Our offensive counterterrorism operations abroad including primarily drone-strikes and special operations missions -- which neither require all-out wars of choice nor a war footing more generally -- have significantly dismantled al Qaeda's existing leadership network.
5) Our security establishment has steadily learned how to more effectively counter terrorism.

Now is a time to celebrate these successes but also ponder how we can carry them into the future. To build on a decade of trial and error, it is essential that we reimagine national security as an object of scientific inquiry. Over the last four centuries, virtually every other aspect of statecraft -- from the economy to social policy to even domestic law enforcement -- has been opened up to engagement with and evaluation by civil society. The practice of national security is long overdue for a similar transformation.

Maintaining the nation's security will, of course, continue to require some degree of secrecy. But there is little reason to think that appropriate secrecy is inconsistent with a fact-based culture of robust and multiplicative inquiry. Indeed, to whatever partial extent that culture already exists within the national security establishment, it has led the move away from many of the counterproductive security measures established after 9/11.

In a world in which efforts to attack Americans are ongoing, developing a formal capacity for critical evaluation of security policy is as urgent as ever. Such capacity will not guarantee that we will avoid all future security failures, or the cruder and less effective responses they tend to provoke. But it will give the security establishment the tools it needs to improve its practices and resist impractical, unproven, and downright dangerous policies. Lacking those tools, the next high profile attack could well inspire another War on Terror, and another danger-filled decade spent relearning lessons about how to keep our people safe.