The most agreed upon theory is that the President set it up as a justification to go on a war frenzy in the Middle East to remove Saddam Hussein from Iraq, a conspiracy which gained further traction when it was shown that the President had to defend his extremely tenuous links between Saddam and the 9/11 attack while all of the terrorists were Saudi Arabian.
The fallout from that day shaped the rest of the decade in almost every conceivable way, spawning the 'War on Terror', distancing the United States under the administration of George W Bush from a large portion of the rest of the World, fatally wounding 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, deception and flat out lies 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.
It wasn't until 2021 that the Americans withdrew from Iraq and Afghanistan in defeat, allowing the Taliban to take back control in Afghanistan and leaving the Iraqi's at the mercy of ISIS so the World is not a safer place and the UK's and America's reputation for human rights took a beating so it does make
you ask, was it all worth it?
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