I never accepted the image of the towers as memorial to a great attack done by a massive enemy.
The attack was overdue and hardly the work of an evil empire. The lack of security on airplanes was no secret. A small group of not all that brilliant islamic fanatics took advantage of an easy target.
In earlier times the bad guys might have been IRA or Red October.. or even some nut Christians from Idaho. Oh yes… today a threat this big could come from any folks hate us… From. North Korea to the Fox News community to some small group of KKK nuts in South Carolina.
Bottom line, the retribution on the Taliban was a form of well merited revenge needed to warn others more than to disable a particular evil empire.
My second reaction is that the actual damage was not as big as the threat. 3000 people is a smallish number measured against the effects of terror in Israel, Northern Ireland, the Philippines, Catalina or Kurdustab.
What made these 3000 lives such a big deal was not even that we are a bigger and target… the memorialization was a product of the Fox/GOP/Bush II need for a great enemy.