Photo by Julien Maculan on Unsplash
By Mark Kenny
A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.
At this time, 25 years ago, traumatised emergency services personnel were still working an enormous pile of glass, concrete and torn metal, with its unknown cocktail of particulate toxins. Many would later develop lethal cancers directly attributable to their exposure.
Day and night, they searched where two of the world's most recognised skyscrapers had stood, towering 110-storey monuments to America's primacy as the world's apex economic and military superpower.
The search for survivors and for human remains would go on for days, both at "Ground Zero," and in Virginia where a third plane had ploughed into the Pentagon.
The death toll from 9/11 is thought to be as high as 10,000 on top of the 2,977 killed in the planes and buildings.
Thanks to a routine airport delay, the trapped passengers on a fourth hijacked plane had called loved ones using seatback 'airphones' and thus became aware of the WTC attacks.
It was clear they were about to be used in the same manner against the Capitol or even the White House.
They took a vote and resolved to act. A steward suggested boiling up water from the coffee machines and armed with that and little else, they rushed the cockpit. In the ensuing fight, the airliner hurtled upside-down into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The heroic last words heard from a passenger on United Airlines flight 93 were "are you ready? OK, let's roll".
The country was in shock. The world too. Neither would fully recover.
It may not have been front-of-mind at that moment but Francis Fukuyama's provocative "end of history" thesis - first floated in a paper in 1989 and then popularised in his bestselling book of 1992 - also lay strewn among the wreckage.
Barely more than a decade before 9/11, he had posited that all the competing meta-narratives of human organisation - theocracy, fascism and communism - had played out to exhaustion, leaving just one rational system, "an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism". History, in the sense that it had been defined by the perennial contest between fundamental narratives of power, had reached a logical, even civilised resolution.
"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
While the al Qaeda attacks of 9/11 didn't, of themselves, show that to be conclusively untrue, they successfully drafted the West to set out the case of its own unworthiness.
In as much as liberalism enshrines freedom of thought and movement, these 'strengths' had been turned against themselves. The affluent West's confidence, openness and ubiquitous technological convenience, became the tools of attack, its prime vulnerabilities.
Osama Bin Laden's key insight was that liberty was in the end, largely a state of mind and one quickly surrendered in the face of a perceived society-wide threat. Tolerance would succumb to terror, freedom to fear. No armies or heavy weaponry would be required.
Moreover, America, once attacked in its heartland, could be relied on to reveal its true character to the world in its violence and scale of its reaction.
Within a month American forces entered Afghanistan under the name Operation Enduring Freedom. Had there been any doubt, the name made it explicit, history was back on again.
Australia invoked the ANZUS alliance, offering to come to the assistance of America.
The war would last for two fruitless decades, with nothing to show for it. Despite former prime minister John Howard declaring he has no regrets - and astonishingly, that women in Afghanistan are a little better off now - America's Australia-supported wars in the Middle East were calamitous.
In Afghanistan, women and girls are now domestic hostages, unable to attend schools and universities or even to access life-saving medical care without a male chaperone. The Taliban's authority is absolute, unchallenged.
The search for Osama Bin Laden, which was at the centre of the campaign, would prove difficult and in 2003, America would bizarrely lose focus, switching its attention to Iraq.
Eyeing easier targets, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld became convinced they could not only bring about regime change with the removal of Saddam Hussein, but democracy.
Howard's indifference to the illegality of the Iraq War, with its deliberately false premise of weapons of mass destruction, its notorious black torture sites and abuses like Abu Ghraib, is disappointing.
It is one thing to make "good faith" errors of judgement in real time, but quite another to stick with them once historical evidence has proved them wrong.
Charlie Greene was just 10 when his father Donald Greene died on Flight 93, that fateful day in 2001.
In a poignant guest essay for The New York Times he lamented a lost America and called for unity over rancour and division.
"The heroes of that day showed us how to respond in our darkest hour. Our task now is to prove that, even 25 years later, we remember how to live together in the light."
Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.