Remembering an event that changed America forever

Four years ago today, only 19 (or perhaps 20) men in the United States knew that the history of this nation was about to change in ways that that even they could not imagine.
Nearly 3,000 people died Sept. 11, 2001, after terrorists took control of four airplanes, flying two of them into the World Trade Centers, one into the Pentagon and one into the ground in western Pennsylvania.
Those acts -- portions of which were witnessed over and over again on television -- shattered whatever confidence the United States had that it was beyond being attacked by its enemies.
It also gave a face to those who hate the United States enough to perpetrate the attacks. That face belonged to a man named Osama bin Laden, a name not one American in a thousand would have recognized on this date in 2001.
Since that day, the lives of tens of thousands of Americans -- the families and friends of those who died in the attacks -- have been disrupted, for some, shattered. And the lives of nearly 1,900 American service men and women have been lost in the war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, causing their families equal pain.
Just as troubling, there is no end in sight.
Comparing wars
The United States won World War II 1,347 days between the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the surrender of Japan on Aug. 15, 1945. It has been 1,460 days since the World Trade Centers fell.
Clearly, the act of war committed by the terrorists on American soil Sept. 11, 2001, was different from that of the Japanese Dec. 7, 1941. Surely, both days live in infamy, but there was a clearly recognizable enemy behind one attack. The United States declared war on Japan; Japan's allies declared war on the United States. The Allied and Axis powers knew who they were fighting, and their generals knew what they would have to do to win.
The difficulty in defining our enemies in this war can be seen in the willingness of the Bush administration and the Congress to invade Iraq in 2003, which produced none of the Sept. 11 hijackers, while neighboring Saudi Arabia, which produced 15 of the terrorists, remains a nominal ally.
Richard Holbrooke, an ambassador to the United Nations during the Clinton administration, defined the enemy in a piece for the Washington Post as: "a movement, with goals, gurus, ideologues, myths and martyrs. They share a core set of virulently anti-Western beliefs and have common goals: to destroy the moderate (and still majority) wing of Islam, to establish Islamist theocracies that look backward toward a mythic 'golden age,' to seek the destruction of Israel, and to inflict maximum damage and human suffering through acts of terrorism."
That constitutes an enemy who is far more difficult to confront, much less defeat, than a Japan or a Germany.
The administration argues that it is not getting proper credit for progress being made in its war against global terror. Its critics argue that the war in Iraq has made bin Laden a folk hero, almost a mythic figure, to young, disaffected Muslims and is more of a recruitment tool for Al-Qaida than a deterrent to terrorism.
A day to reflect
The anniversary of 9/11 provides a day on which the victims of that attack should be remembered. It also provides an annual reminder of the need to evaluate the progress that is being made on bringing those behind the attacks to justice and on winning the war on terror.
Even this year, when the nation's attention is focused on an area of the country where a natural catastrophe has struck and where lives were lost and shattered, attention must be paid to the unnatural act of 9/11. Indeed, the events on the Gulf Coast point up yet another way in which the events of Sept. 11, 2001, reverberate.
FEMA, the agency that has come under criticism for a tardy and inadequate response to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was created in 1979 as a successor to Civil Defense. The mission of the new agency was clearly focused on responding to natural disasters.
It was folded into the new Homeland Security Department in 2002 with 21 other departments and agencies, and over the years its manpower has been cut by 500 positions.
The idea that more Americans may have died after a hurricane in 2005 because of changes made in response to a 2001 terrorist attack is a chilling one. But it is another indication of how much changed on that horrible day four years ago tomorrow.