And more than once, but part of the syndrome is suppressing this information.

As long as you can blame the harmless scarecrows for the evil in the world, you don't have to think about the real predators.

The Conventional Wisdom out there among the Enlightened can be approximated as follows:

All the crap around the world is because the U.S. and its allies have been mucking things up for years. The Soviets were never a real threat, and neither is radical Islam now. In fact, al Qaeda as an organization is pretty much imaginary, and the War on Terror is pretty much all on our side. The only reason 9/11 happened was because of America's aggressive foreign policy, and the only reason peace doesn't reign on Earth right now is because we don't have an Enlightened leadership that will sit down and talk reason with those opposed to us.

On the very far end of this bell curve you have those who believe, among many other things, that 9/11 was carried off by our own government, and that the CIA probably killed Bhutto (No? Wait for it).

The holes in this worldview could easily pass an elephant, but the beauty of it is that it makes the danger controllable, and something that can be dealt with by a person who doesn't believe that war ever solves anything.

Not only is the evil kept in a nice box ("elect enough Democrats, and it's all fixed"), but the scarecrow Black Hats can be derided and mocked safely. Not one person who has carried a poster of Bush as Hitler openly down a street in front of cameras has ever lost a wink of sleep. This isn't true of those who have confronted our real enemies.