The Noughties: 9/11

It's not only the end of the year but as the year ends in a 9, it's also the end of the decade so we can expect to read lots of lists about the best and worst of things over the last 10 years.
The first thing that comes to mind when i look back at the decade just gone is the 2001 World Trade Centre attack. The fallout from that day shaped the rest of the decade in almost every conceivable way.
Such was it's impact that it wouldn't do it justice to include it in a post with other events from the last ten years. It defined and overwhelmed the decade entirely.
It spawned the 'War on Terror', distanced the United States under the administration of George W Bush from a large portion of the rest of the World, fatally wounded the premiership of Tony Blair and left so many people dead and dying that the number is counted in the hundreds of thousands.
Within less than a month of the atrocity, the bombs were falling on Afghanistan although the White House focus had always been on an even more controversial target, Saddam Hussein and Iraq.
With the Afghanistan War underway, Bush and Blair embarked upon on a massive effort using spin and deception to persuade the public that the trail of guilt for 9/11 somehow led to Baghdad, an argument that fractured long held global alliances.
Despite Bush standing beneath a banner declaring 'Mission Accomplished' in 2003, the continuation of the Iraq and Afghan wars cast a long shadow over the entire decade. Bush won a second term much to our surprise but the depth of feeling against the war in the UK, along with confirmation that Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction as warned, broke public trust in Blair and saw him bounced out of power by his own party with the lowest ever ratings for a Labour Prime Minister.
All the while, 9/11 instigator Osama Bin Laden remained, and remains, at large and terrorists have attacked and killed in Madrid, Bali, Mumbai and London.
American troops are still in Iraq whose citizens face suicide missions and truck bombs on an increasing scale while Afghanistan is a killing field and the decade of war there has achieved nothing and only transplanted the disease to Pakistan.
At the end of the decade, terrorism is more of a threat than ever, Iraqis are being massacred by an enemy that was not there prior to our intervention and as the western troops death count rises, we are making plans to cut and run from Afghanistan and leave it to it's horrendous fate as we did in Iraq.
Hopes were high that the new American President would bring some sense to proceedings but with his decision to expand the war in Afghanistan by sending in a further 30,000 troops, the events of 2001 look as though they will continue long into the next decade.