Rightfully so. People should be upset. We let a sense of urgency take over our moral compass. Which was the completely wrong way to look at this conflict anyway: we had no need to be that urgent given that our resources were (and still are) effectively inexhaustible. We got bad intelligence, we made a lot of enemies, and we lost the moral high ground that the US had worked hard to rebuild after Vietnam. The failure happened at the top: Bush (presumably guided by Cheney and the neo-con "long war" doctrine) chose to ignore decades of intelligence research showing that torture leads to bad intel. Because the failure happened at the top, nobody will pay for it.
Had we done things the right (slow) way, we would have a lot more friends in the region. Because the long, slow way of intelligence gathering involves building trust and developing friendship with people. But the American public doesn't have the patience for long peacekeeping missions like that, and the international community doesn't either.
There are so many layers of secret courts and classified legal opinions that it's hard to say the US has much rule of law anymore. People have lost faith in the legal system much the same as they have lost faith in our legislative system. All that's left is the executive branch, which leaves us dangerously at risk of a dictator taking over if we elect the wrong person, because the other two branches of government are too weak to stop him. I hate to get all tinfoil-hat, but it doesn't seem too far-fetched anymore.
This seems to be thrown around a lot. You hear things like, "if we didn't go into Iraq/Afghanistan, we would have more friends in the region," "if we didn't prop up Mubarak or the Saudis or someone else, we would have more friends in the region," "if we gave more support to the Palestinians, we would have more friends in the region."
I think this is the wrong way to think about our policy. We currently have a set of "friends" in the region; Israel, Saudi, etc. The things we do will always upset a portion of the population, but you will also have some who support those actions (foreign policy has not all been a shambles, which is why we retain regional allies in spite of the things that have happened over the past two decades).
Changing your actions will never guarantee that you will make more friends, because in making some friends we would lose others. By catering to the progressive populations in the Middle East, you isolate the conservative populations, and vice versa. Rapprochement with Iran, as an example, may seem like a fine idea, but the mere prospect has Israel and the Saudis concerned. So changing policy cannot achieve "more friends." What we can do is choose who we want to be friends with carefully, and let that guide our policy.
The friends we've chosen in the region also don't help us. Neither Saudi Arabia nor Israel are particularly well-liked in the region (and that's putting it lightly), but both are seen as US puppets.
Honestly I don't think we really care much anymore what the Saudis think; the regime has fantastic wealth but very little real power beyond holding the purse strings for hyper conservative terror groups. I think eventually the hypocrisy and opulence of the regime will cause the terror groups to throw off their former masters and come after them -- and all credible reports say the Saudi army isn't much more than a facade propped up by a handful of US contractors. We probably wouldn't let them fall to terror groups, but we also aren't really comfortable propping up a regime that is actively funding a proxy war against us.
"The friends we've chosen in the region also don't help us"
The recent OPEC decision declining to reduce production in the face of falling oil prices, thus screwing over Russia hard, means that Saudi Arabia is most certainly a useful US ally.
All allies are useful, even backstabbing frenemies like Saudi Arabia. But Saudi Arabia (or more specifically, the ruling regime in Saudi Arabia) needs us more than we need them these days.
I mean, I realize the prime reason they fund Islamist terror groups is to cause regional instability that drives up the price of Saudi oil...
That's actually a terrible reason to fund armed groups. Al Qaeda's original mission was to replace the Saudi monarchy; there were many attacks in Saudi Arabia after 9/11, they weren't talked about much. So the Saudi monarchy is not interested in helping those kinds of groups.
Armed groups are often funded by wealthy individuals for a variety of reasons (Osama bin Laden being a famous example). Armed groups funded by the Saudi monarchy are in other countries, fighting the regime's enemies by proxy (eg. the Syrian and Iranian governments).
Had we done things the right (slow) way, we would have a lot more friends in the region. Because the long, slow way of intelligence gathering involves building trust and developing friendship with people. But the American public doesn't have the patience for long peacekeeping missions like that, and the international community doesn't either.
There are so many layers of secret courts and classified legal opinions that it's hard to say the US has much rule of law anymore. People have lost faith in the legal system much the same as they have lost faith in our legislative system. All that's left is the executive branch, which leaves us dangerously at risk of a dictator taking over if we elect the wrong person, because the other two branches of government are too weak to stop him. I hate to get all tinfoil-hat, but it doesn't seem too far-fetched anymore.