"Everyone else is an extremist, but I'm totally sane and justified."

When you look at "Muslim Extremists" around the world, they are inspired by the same kind of events and influences that "Christian Americans" are. Zealot leaders lying to the people to further their own aims, and the people lapping it up because they see "evidence" of oppression from "the outsiders", are indoctrinated to hate "the outsiders", and have their own problems which they're easily led to blame "the outsiders" for. A minority of people fall for it, but enough to make a lot of noise, and it's just enough that the state can seize it as a "mandate from the people" to justify its actions, and everyone else just shrugs and lets it happen.

Muslim extremists around the world are far more driven by political and land conflicts than anything else. They are far more similar to the IRA than to any Christian extremists.

ISIS is the one which seems most ideology driven. But Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, the PLF, the ETLO, the various Kashmiri militants, all of these are largely a result of land conflicts, like the IRA

Heh, funnily, I know I wasn't sane. I bought the "weapons of mass destruction" and "pre-emptive strike" lines and the notion of not letting the terrorists win.

What happened, I think, is much more banal. Everyone was pissed at such a large successful terrorist attack. Politicians took that as a strong signal that they must do something. And the easiest solutions were new policing agencies, privacy invasion, and invading sovereign nations. Those were easy answers to sell to angry citizens. They were also the wrong answers that lead to hundreds of thousands dead, the region destabilized, new larger terrorist organizations (ISIS/ISIL) and trillions of dollars wasted.

The right answer just wasn't flashy. Locking cockpits, diplomacy with Afghanistan leaders, and ultimately intelligence gathering and a targeted strike on Osama bin ladin if he was found. We Americans wanted blood, what we needed was to address the holes that made the attack possible and to just move on.