Whether our response to 9/11 was an "overreaction" kind of misses the point. As do most people when discussing terrorism.

Look, people. We supposedly went after Iraq to "fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here". That's crap. We will never, ever fight them here, no matter what we do over there. That's not what terrorism is about. It's not about war. Or direct conflict. At all.

Terrorists have no desire to occupy and/or destroy our country. Never have. Oh, they might if they had any reason to believe they could, but they don't, and they know it. They don't have the manpower, resources or mobility to inflict even the tiniest fraction of the damage necessary to bring us to our knees. They can't possibly kill enough people, destroy enough resources, or occupy enough territory (or any at all, in this case) to wage anything like a conventional war. We will never see squadrons of terrorists in our streets capturing our towns. We will never see terrorist bomber fleets over our cities conducting surgical strikes against military/industrial targets. It will never, ever happen.

Because they know that they will never be able to inflict the kinds of casualties necessary to achieve any kind of military victory whatsoever, they don't try. Terrorist attacks are not military actions. They're political. They are designed to use what little resource they have to take (relatively) few lives, and do (relatively) little damage, but to do so in such a spectacular and horrific way that it terrifies the public and triggers actions that are beneficial to the terrorist agenda. And they do this just often enough to keep up appearances and maintain a certain level of fear in their opponent.

To that end, 9/11 was a phenomenally successful action. Not to trivialize anything that happened on that day - it was tragic, no doubt - but from a military perspective, 3000 deaths and a couple of buildings, no matter how impressive, is a papercut to a country like the U.S. From a political perspective, however, the 9/11 attack was massively impactful. Since then, we as a country have been living in such fear that we have surrendered basic freedoms (more than we would have tolerated otherwise, anyway), we have weakened global diplomatic ties, and we have bogged down our military in a foreign occupation that has done very little, or nothing, to combat terrorism, yet weakens our national defense.

At the same time, that foreign occupation is a galvanizing presence both in the Middle East and at home, provoking divisiveness and civil unrest, providing the sort of instability and fervor on both sides that play very well to the kinds of sabre-rattling and propaganda that further the radical Islamic agenda. Again, to wonder if our response to 9/11 is an "overreaction" is missing the point - any military response at all is a nonsequitur. We're fighting the wrong war.

It's no surprise to me that we haven't seen any major attempts at attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11. They haven't needed any. The residual effects from the 9/11 attack are still more helpful to them than they could possibly have hoped. Our presence in Iraq is far more beneficial to their cause than anything they could manage to do over here.

Bottom line is, success in the "war on terror" is not, has never been, and will never be measured by body count. Yes, we lost 3,000 American lives and a few big buildings on 9/11. But when you stop to look at and understand the actual goals of those attacks, it was a massive victory, but only because we have given it to them. And we are continuing to enable them, because apparently we just don't get it.