I share many of your sentiments.

I also like this article by Thomas Friedman complaining in part about the response to 9/11, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/opinion/friedman-the-whole-truth-and-nothing-but.html:

Why has this been a lost decade? An answer can be found in one simple comparison: How Dwight Eisenhower and his successors used the cold war and how George W. Bush used 9/11.