Well, it's too late to get any benefit out of recognizing the mistakes that got us to this point.
Simply acknowledging them is essential, once that is out of the way, figuring out our next step is what we need to do, not flog the dead horse of past mistakes. Where do we go from here? I really don't know, I'm no expert in geopolitics or foreign relations, at best I can point out that those who have appointed themselves as the guardians of the state are not only wrong, but they have based their actions on assumptions more relevant to their own careers and interests than any vision of history or humanity.

The intransigence of our current leadership is based on the fear than any challenge to their competence is an attempt to subvert their domestic economic agenda. This habit, probably a result of the Cold War (when their economic hegemony was indeed being challenged on a global scale!) makes it impossible for them to see any obstacle in terms other than a battle between left and right, socialism versus capitalism. The Iron Age clerics and religious fanaticism of the Middle East are incomprehensible to them except as just a new type of "collectivist" threat. And when their policies fail, it must surely be because of socialist treachery at home. You've seen the discourse on these boards, it always comes back to that. No matter that the Islamists despise socialism and come from a culture deeply rooted in the bazarr and the marketplace. Of course, socialism is not going to save or destroy us any more than free enterprise is, this is a religious war, but our leadership cannot comprehend this on a fundamental level, no matter how much lip service it lavishes on it.

Religious fanaticism does play a role in American politics, but it was originally mobilized as a force to combat the atheist Red hordes, not as a means of persecuting other faiths (due to the wise and enlightened secularism of the founding fathers). The deep political divisions of the American community make it difficult to come up with any coherent strategy to face the problems which now plague us, and not just the war, but in almost every field. The highly defined, and in my opinion, totally artificial, constellation of issues which now separates right and left, Republican and Democrat, has been carefully devised and reinforced for generations for one purpose only: to ensure that economic status and privilege is maintained. But that is a problem we've already solved, we have the best of both worlds, the dynamism and freedom of capitalism balanced against the humanity and compassion of socialism. America, has solved that problem, and has shown half the world how to solve it, we have both opportunity AND security, although never as much of either as we might like. Until we can divorce this issue from foreign affairs, the law, sex, religion, morality, immigration, and the host of other issues which divide us (the so-called cultural issues), we can never come together to face any problem effectively.

The division of America into two warring camps is not new, but it has only recently become the schism that threatens to paralyze us into partisan inaction. It is this that I believe to be the most dangerous threat to our security, our prosperity, and our national destiny. Unless we can put it behind us, we are doomed.