No, not December 7, 1941 which was the date of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. I’m referring to September 11, 2001. The date a group of Islamic extremists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
I remember it so clearly. My officemates and I were playing Starcraft when we heard the news over the phone. We checked the news websites and they were all unreachable. Overloaded. SMS messages soon came pouring in. One said: “The World Trade Center is no more”. I didn’t believe it.
Only when I got home and watched the replay of the planes hitting the towers and their crashing down did it finally dawned on me that the World Trade Center was really gone. And that these events has just changed the world greatly. This attack awakened the United States to a new, previously ignored, threat.
Five years hence and we wonder if the awakening has really done much. Osama Bin Laden is still on the loose. Afghanistan is still in turmoil. It can even be argued that the Middle East is more strife-torn than ever. All because of the United States’ War on Terror.
But does this mean the United States should have done nothing? No. It just means that it needs to do more and that the rest of the world has to join in. Not doing anything is just letting the threat grow to eventually come out again more destructive than ever. This threat is not just against the United States. It is a threat against the whole world. Or at least the part that wants freedom.