EVERYONE in the world knew where they were on that morning 21 years ago, when passenger planes became weapons of mass destruction.
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I resented the notoriety of the twin towers attack because it created an absurd date of historical infamy, featuring lunatics who found hate through religion, like we find peace.
I was half asleep when a mate rang and said - "Turn on the TV."
"Why, what channel?"
"Doesn't matter."
The South Tower started to implode at 9.59am and for a few moments mesmerised news anchors kept discussing the calamity until they looked up in shock.
It was the biggest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbour, and once again the most sophisticated government on earth was caught napping.
I supported not so much the Iraq war but rather the need for President George W Bush to do something.
He wouldn't have lasted a year in office had he done nothing.
He launched an invasion of Afghanistan a month later and should have stayed there.
That's where the terrorists were. Iraq was just a hangover from the first Gulf War.
In 2003 Bush took Australian Prime Minister John Howard and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair with him into Iraq, based on flawed intelligence they say.
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Had they stayed in Afghanistan they could have destroyed the Taliban, for very good reasons now obvious.
Instead, they invested most of their efforts on Iraq, based on a "mistaken", or as some say phoney belief that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction, like nerve gas or dirty bombs or whatever.
The super smart Iraqis worked out two strategies - make the weapons of mass destruction vanish and draw America into a protracted conflict of body bags and endless financial costs.
I'm sure it would not have taken planners very long to work out that the best way to humiliate the Americans and discredit their reason for invasion was to make sure any weapons of mass destruction Iraq possessed were spirited out of the country months before the expected invasion.
Secondly, they adopted the North Vietnamese formula for an insurgency capable of defeating the biggest military machine on earth, just like Vietnam.
It's called public opinion. You don't have to win. You can't possibly win an orthodox war against the US.
But you can keep those body bags coming in a sustained insurgency until public opinion in the US turns against their government. Just like Vietnam.
US military deaths in Iraq totalled less than 5000, nowhere near the 58,000 killed in Vietnam, but with the memory of Vietnam, enough people in the US started to oppose the war.
Afghanistan casualties were even less than the Iraq venture despite a war lasting 20 years, but both Joe Biden and Donald Trump saw compelling reason to want to get out.
The Americans can't believe their luck today, fighting a proxy war against Vladimir Putin, and no boots on the ground and no GI body bags in sight.
There's an argument that suggests the birth and growth of the insanity called ISIS came about because in 2003 the Americans toppled the regime in Iraq.
Maybe true, but since the start of Bush's "War on Terror" the worldwide threat has been contained, in the West at least.
There's not been another Twin-Towers blockbuster.
The spook movies based on terrorist plots often involve some rogue terrorist outfit obtaining a dirty nuclear bomb to detonate in London or New York, or some major population centre.
It seems entirely possible and credible and maybe the security agencies have already secretly foiled various attempts, however, we haven't seen one go off yet. Touch wood.
The attacks on the Twin Towers on 9/11 made us realise that there are extremists who blame the West for everything bad on the planet.
We're the hated, decadent antithesis of their warped, misogynist interpretation of Islam.
They're lunatics. They think we're lunatics but we are prone or partial to compromise and tolerance. They're not.
The US military lost more than 7000 souls in Iraq and Afghanistan, or more than twice the number killed at the Twin Towers.
But, I'm a great fan of the American satirist P. J. O'Rourke and his book about the first Gulf War, called Give War a Chance.
O'Rourke came up with the title after seeing it stencilled across the white tee shirt of a US marine in Iraq.
You can't give peace a chance with terrorists. They're way past peaceful rationale. Any overtures we make are seen as weakness and worth exploiting. That's why they love public opinion in the West. We're suckers for appeasement, even though we now know that appeasement merely delays the inevitable.
You can't give peace a chance with terrorists. They're way past peaceful rationale.
Any overtures we make are seen as weakness and worth exploiting.
That's why they love public opinion in the West. We're suckers for appeasement, even though we now know that appeasement merely delays the inevitable.
Sooner or later we will fall victim again to the insanity of terrorism, either from the far right and from Islamic extremism.
But in a social sense we're battle hardened, from events like the Bali bombings. We'll be ready next time.
