The harrowing image even twenty years later sears with heat from distant memory. On a beautiful, crystal clear morning, September 11, 2001 , a vicious gash of reality was lanced across America’s psyche by determined Islamic terrorists orchestrated by an international collective looking to decapitate America’s confidence and vitality in a ruthless and brilliant multi-pronged attack.  America’s smug and lax view of its own potential vulnerabilities, reinforced by a fifty year victory in the cold war against communism leaving it the solitary superpower in the world, and utterly ignorant of a new threat despite multiple sentinel attacks – the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center,  the 1998 bombing of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the brazen 2000 attack on the USS Cole- left an America woefully unprepared for the inevitable next step in a war, attacking the enemy’s very citadels of power.  The self declared leader of the enemy force, Osama Bin Laden, had interpreted the complete lack of retaliatory response from the United States from the previous various attacks as marking the United States as an impotent, paper tiger.  September 11th was an attack of ultimate disdain , directly striking the financial center, military headquarters, and sans the heroism of a group of passengers on Flight 93 to defy fate, the political heart of the enemy Capitol itself.   The simultaneous blows brought America to its knees.  All transport and economic activity halted. The country watch in horror as the Pentagon burned, a plane fell out of the sky in Pennsylvania, and the two identically injured massive Manhattan  towers suddenly crumbled like so much paper mâché in New York, taking thousands of lives.

The immediate reaction was revulsion, followed by angry resolution.  The President declared those that had committed this national atrocity would find no quarter – not the individuals, nor the countries that harbored them.  The giant arm of aggression was mobilized. Monies were traced and frozen. The country was placed on war footing – phone calls and computer traffic  were monitored, airports, trains and ports were stiffened with military patrols and intense screening of passengers and freight.  The military organized to strike at the acknowledged criminal lair of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and swiftly with knife like precision drove the terrorists into caves and the overlord Taliban out of power and wrenched back to Pakistan.  One by one, the worst culprits, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Zacharias Moussaoui, and eventually Osama Bin Ladin himself were hunted down and either captured or killed. World wide cooperation was nearly total, even from the Saudi Kingdom, out of which the radical strain of Islam, Wahabiism, had been protected and nurtured to such an extent that 16 of 19 of the 9/11 hijacker suicide terrorists proved home grown.  The response seemed serious and relentless, and the threat imperiled to near extinction.

Yet, almost from the beginning, the weakness and vulnerability Bin Laden prophesied would  lead to America’s downfall, like exploited cracks in supposedly impregnable  ramparts, began to show. The cracks have grown and remain a present danger, every bit as much as was felt present by Bin Laden September 10th, 2001.

Internal Retribution:  Almost immediately the brief period of national unity and patriotic purpose was turned upon by the loathe America and western civilization  crowd. The lefts’ re-branding of the horrific event started forthwith. Islam is a peaceful religion. The Saudis that flew the planes as repurposed  flying bombs, killing over three thousand Americans, were driven by the oppressive poverty of their upbringing, and together with America’s unflinching support of the occupier Israel, unleashed their desperation. America is guilty of a world hegemony view that has lead to overreach and arrogance among oppressed peoples.  Christianity with the Crusades showed the West as foundationally culpable for the current state of Islamic hatred.  America profiles because other cultures are viewed as inferior – therefore profiling must be banished.  All phones must be equally monitored.  All passengers must submit to humiliating airport searches. Apologies must be made to set things right.  America has no right to identify good and evil when the very nature of its founding was racist and evil.  The west must accept occasional violence to the point of bombings and beheadings of teachers and priests,  rigorous policing of free speech to prevent any perceived insult, and acceptance of sharia informed upon its own citizen as representing “culture”.   After 20 years of focused, painful, and expensive investment of lives and treasure, one finds the Taliban once again in control of Afghanistan enforcing sharia and the obliteration of western concepts of free speech, equality, and artistic expression, and the Shia Iranian theocrats pulling the strings in Iraq, Yemen,  and Syria.  The West and America are locked down, churches abandoned, free speech and free commerce restricted, and constant battering regarding western principles that had one time achieved a classless, opportunity driven, post racial society.

Sense of Mission: The precise and surgical identification of the problem and routing terrorist cells in Afghanistan was almost immediately cluttered with delusional and distracting “nation building” and “exporting of freedom”.  The festering problem with Saddam Hussein and Iraq was intentionally packaged with the original criminal clique of radical Islam,  the United States and Britain leading a “hunt” to remove weapons of mass destruction, which rapidly evolved into the “you broke it, you own it” admonition of Colin Powell coming true. With the spectacular elimination of the Baath army of Iraq and capture and execution of Hussein, the “nation builders” moved in and established an oversight “administration” that the Iraqis immediately hated and saw as colonial , and initiated a nasty, bloody six year insurrection that cost thousands more American lives and limbs and hundreds of British troop casualties, as well as collapse of the consensus mission  in the entire area.  The eventual subduing of the insurrection at great cost was arbitrarily given up by Obama to focus on the “good” war in Afghanistan, along with an apology tour that only magnified the appearance of weakness to America’s enemies and horrified its allies in the region.  Syria and Libya collapsed with American incompetence and local radical explosion. By 2016, radicals overran Syria and western Iraq, returning the medieval caliphate concept, made Libya a living hell, and threatened Yemen and Egypt.  A brief respite in the mission creep, achieved by the Trump administration, crushing ISIS and taking out Al-Baghdadi and Soleimani, was nullified by Biden’s obsession with being the Anti-Trump, resuming humiliating subservience to the Iranian Theocrats and disastrously blowing the Afghanistan withdrawal, putting the same Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives back in charge that the original mission had pointedly identified , captured and placed in Guantanamo (only to be released by Obama in obscene payment for the return of an American army deserter).

Recognition of American Cultural Identity:  The calamity of 9/11 had focused clarity on what was so offensive to the radical terrorists that planned and performed the  attack – American culture itself, most specifically freedom.  The story of the hijackers, particularly as personified by Mohammed Atta the lead hijacker, was their hatred of American influence.  As reported regarding Atta and his particular crew, they were particularly disgusted by their own weakness living in America in preparation for the attacks.  They found themselves in dance clubs, strip clubs, participating in debauched acts that only magnified their need to strike back at the Great Satan and cleanse themselves.  American freedom, American interracial  and inter sex mixing, music, abundance at the stores, even easy access to “flight schools” with no particular training or study necessary to initiate self improvement were indications of the temptations they realized would only destroy their home cultures as they interpreted them, clinging to a ninth century interpretation of Islamic culture, superior to the western model but subjugated by the satanic influences of western individualism and hedonism.  Their war was the Long War, and they counted on the globalist anti-American clique to eventually fight their fight for them.   American freedom as proposed by the Founders was a virus upon the world, and had to be irradiated at its source.  Their willing allies are the global elites who disdain the average Americans’ unwillingness to surrender to a generic globalist definition of good, a ‘world citizen” subservient to consumption, identified and categorized by sex and race not accomplishment, restricted in self actualization by strict obedience to directives on “health” and “climate”, and oblivious to preserving any borders that would maintain a national consensus and identity.

The consensus appears that twenty years in the interval between the attacks of 9/11 and the withdrawal from Afghanistan on the twentieth anniversary of those attacks reflect a one sided victory for Bin Laden’s prophetic vision of the eventual outcome of his diabolical plan.  An estimated 80 million Americans were born after 9/11. They and millions more have no direct memory of any of the emotions or consequences proceeding from that terrible day. The vision of their world has been firmly formed by the cadre of intelligentsia in schools that form the core of the loathe America crowd.  Its no small wonder that the American President felt he could abruptly and cavalierly give up all the hard won gains of the past twenty years and abandon Americans in-country to the wrath of the Taliban without consequences.  After all, what is an American that would necessitate special consideration?  Nothing exceptional at stake here, please move along.  Good and evil are antiquated concepts to this antiquated President.  We best learn to keep our heads down, mind are own business, and get on with the excision of the American Ideal forever from the American Mind.

It may turn out that the devil Bin Ladin and his operational chief Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were right all along.  America and its obsession with freedom is a relic, it just needs a push to initiate its own self destruction, and the rotted edifice will come tumbling down.  We shall see.  Like all harsh realities in life, as free individuals, know what ramparts are worth defending and defend them with your very being.  The defense is only as strong as its weakest link. Ultimately, stand tall, acknowledge your core beliefs, and with sustained resolution,  you will survive.

If not, payback’s a bitch.