On Friday, 25 years will have passed since 19 al-Qaeda-backed terrorists hijacked four American passenger airplanes and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the home of the Department of Defense. The fourth plane, the now-famous Flight 93, in which 40 heroic passengers fought back against the jihadists, was downed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, potentially sparing the lives of several more thousand people. In many ways, the September 11 attacks have come to define a generation of those who lived through it and experienced the attacks firsthand.

As Bush has since declared, he shifted to being a "wartime president". The response was vast: thousands of American servicemen in and around the Middle East were thrust into action. While President Bush may have proclaimed that his government was fighting for freedom abroad, his government enacted laws which granted much greater surveillance powers to the federal government, ensuring the government could detain and investigate with far greater ease. Osama Bin Laden said in 2004, that "he [Bush] took dictatorship and suppression of freedoms to his son and they named it the Patriot Act, under the pretense of fighting terrorism."

As to Bush himself, on the day of the attacks, he was concerned with fulfilling bizarre and needless stops at Elementary School's to push his government program onto the youth of America. As Mark Steyn wrote after the events:

"There was a grim symmetry in the way this act of war interrupted the president at a grade-school photo-op. The federal government has no constitutional responsibility for education: it is a state affair, delegated mostly to tiny municipal school boards..."

Meaning that "the president was reminded of his most awesome responsibility at a time when he was discharging his most footling."

Quite. In fact, the foolishness of the visit to that elementary school had such strange optics to it, that, three years later, Bin-Laden, the man responsible for the attacks, couldn't help but to offer his opinion too:

"It never occurred to us that the commander-in-chief of the American armed forces would abandon 50,000 of his citizens in the twin towers to face those great horrors alone, the time when they most needed him.

But because it seemed to him that occupying himself by talking to the little girl about the goat and its butting was more important than occupying himself with the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers, we were given three times the period required to execute the operations – all praise is due to Allah."

If your country's commander-in-chief can be rendered useless, at a time when most needed, via non-constitutional responsibilities, it's no wonder a few embittered Saudi's can raze your financial and defence institutions to the ground. Nonetheless, the nation rallied around the presdient, allowing him to prosecute a war that proved, in the end, fruitless. Sure, it's easy with hindsight. But Bush was living in the past: his country hadn't been able to claim a military "victory" since the Second World War, despite the Dept. of Defense being the most lavishly-funded military department for decades.

Meaning that by the time America had pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021, an estimated $8 trillion dollars had been thrown down the drain. Which was of course part of the plotters' plan all along:

Bin Laden: Goal is to bankrupt U.S.

In the same aforementioned 2004 interview, Bin-Laden went on record as saying that "We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy." Invoking al-Qaeda's tactics he stated that "We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat." He also said al Qaeda has found it "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations."

So it must be sobering for U.S State and Defence department officials to continue to see, or choose not to see, Bin–Laden's prognostications continue to be corroborated. The latest edition of the US' state-sponsored-terrorist-ass-whoopin' in the Persian gulf has the current administration so off-kilter that The Jerusalem Post has floated the idea of a debt relief program for military-age enlisters. Which is just what a nation that's over $40 trillion in debt needs.

Be that as it may, Friday's commemorations across the nation should hopefully be solemn. 9/11 is arguably still the most significant event of the 21st century: in what it signified, what it meant for America, and how the world responded. One more thought, though: in the aftermath of the attacks, while much of the US public was clamoring for a "strong" response from their government, there was a small group of men who suggested a better idea: rebuilding both towers, "taller, stronger, and better" than before. Who was one of the main sponsors? Donald Trump. A distinctly more American attitude than putting more men and women through the meat grinder in Whereverstan.