Nine years ago, 19 men attacked the most powerful country in the world — a country many people unquestioningly called the most powerful country in the history of the world. Their weapons were crude, but they used them to commandeer the great engines of the country's commerce, and turn them into dreadnoughts. Their educations were for the most part rudimentary, but they managed to find their way to the country's vitals — to the very architecture of its economy and defenses — and to deal it a blow both literal and symbolic. Their understanding of the universe was so benighted that they worshiped a God who countenanced murder, and yet by the end of their mission they and those who dispatched them had every reason to believe that their God had granted them a miracle.

They — both the 19 men and those who dispatched them — have been called many things in the nine years since the attack, and rightly so. They have been called cowards. They have been called losers. They have been called psychopaths. They have been called murderers. And of course they have been called terrorists.

What they have never been called, however, is what they were, and still are:

Successes.

The reluctance to give them their due is understandable — the country they attacked is driven and defined by fear of one ever-shifting metric of failure: Terrorists win. But is there any longer any doubt that their story counts as the greatest success story of this century, a triumph beyond the reach of even Google and China and Fox News? Is there any question that everything they set out to achieve they succeeded in achieving?

They set out to level the playing field between Christian and Islamic civilizations by inspiring enmity between them. They set out to lure the country they attacked into ruinous and impoverishing wars, where it could be bled dry. They set out to disrupt its economy, and thus to prove that it rested on unstable foundations. Mostly, they set out to prove that it wasn't all that — that it was softer and more vulnerable than anyone imagined. Its power had always been bolstered by principle, but they predicted that its principles wouldn't survive the test of fear, and that its power would accordingly decline.

And so it came to pass, all of it, to the extent that the country entered into not just one unwinnable war but two; to the extent that it chose its soldiers on the basis of class, and thus ensured a future of permanent division; to the extent it went both gleefully and methodically about the business of bankrupting itself; to the extent that its citizens grew into the habit of questioning each other, but never themselves; and to the extent that they lived not only in fear of another attack, but of the very principles they were supposed to hold dear. Nine years after the attack, they even lived in fear of a mosque being built near the buildings destroyed in a murderous miracle by the 19 attackers, because they convinced themselves that the mosque — and not the wars, and not the abrogation of its ideals — would fulfill their fear that the terrorists won.

Did they?

Well, there is no doubt that if the country should fall — if it should lose its principles or its power or both — then historians of the future would trace the beginning of its collapse to September 11, 2001, when 19 men took on the most powerful country in the world in the most successful sneak attack since the Greeks came to Troy bearing gifts.

But there is also no doubt that the 19 men couldn't have done it alone. They were losers, after all. They were psychopaths. They were murderers. They could never have succeeded without us.

9/11, NINE YEARS ON:

TOM JUNOD: The Falling Man

SCOTT RAAB: Good News at Ground Zero

PLUS: The 'Mosque'

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