TODAY’S ELECTION is not simply a watershed in American politics, but a punctuation mark in the American war in the greater Middle East. Tomorrow–or whenever the outcome is certain–things will be very different.

The anger, emotion and energy that flowed from September 11 has largely dissipated; the Middle East war is now more clearly a long, twilight struggle to be punctuated by periods of combat, occasionally very intense. Just as Korea and Vietnam were really campaigns in the larger contest of the Cold War, so Afghanistan and Iraq are campaigns in a larger Middle East war.