The United States is now undergoing a great reckoning. With collapsing confidence in the government, obsessive debate about the war, rising contempt for the president, shame in relation to the plight of our young soldiers, acrimony at holiday tables -- ''I told you so" versus ''What would you have us do?" -- the nation confronts the all-too-human fact that our frightened responses to Al Qaeda, at home and abroad, have done us far more damage than the nihilist terrorists ever could have. Our communal dread, instead of sharpening our responses, made them reckless. But the damage has not only been...