We Lost The War on Terror on October 26, 2001

This is the date that the USA Patriot Act was signed in to law.

Read the following from Landscapes of Jihad by Faisel Devji, assistant professor of history at New York's New School University:

The hollowness of the World Trade Center, whose imposing towers crumbled so easily in the face of al-Qaeda's attack, represented the void at the heart of Western civilization itself, not least because the attacks of September 11 were followed by a significant if partial breakdown of America's much-vaunted culture of democratic rights and civil liberties, including even a suspension of certain provisions of the Geneva Convention...This fact was not lost upon any participant in the jihad, to whom it demonstrated that the West's moral superiority was not only hypocritical, because its boasted freedom was based upon the un-freedom of others, but hollow as well, because it could not preserve this freedom even for its own citizens. [Emphasis added]

And so we see that people in Muslim countries, even the terrorists, are quite sophisticated enough to see that the liberals are right: the World's acceptance of America's ideals of Freedom and Democracy are dependent on our own willingness to defend these ideals at home.