Oddly, this year, I am not so much saddened, as grim.

Yes, a tragedy occurred this day, two decades ago, and yes, many have forgotten. Yes, the memory has been systematically scrubbed, so that we cannot as easily find the images of the buildings collapsing, or the jets striking the building caught in realtime that I saw broadcast that very day. And yes, there paper americans, born here or elsewhere, who tell us it's really our fault.

In a way, it is, but not for the reasons usually given by the cowards and cosmopolitan, educated elite who don't want to remember the sounds of bodies striking the glass ceiling from the documentary of the firefighters. Nobody wants to, but to pretend it didn't happen is also folly.

No, we had chance after chance to treat the tribal societies there as the societies they are, rather than as nascent westerners. To stop fucking with the politics there over much of the last century, and at the very last, in GW "1", to finish the job, take out Baghdad, tell them to behave, and walk away instead of miring ourselves there for thirty years.

I'm sure some of my readers will disagree. I know I disagree with myself from 12 years ago as I had bought into neocon nation building back then. I still think our blame lies in both doing too little out of cowardice - and thus the cease-fire that occupied the first third of this thirty years war - and too much via "nation building".

Punch them in the face hard, tell them to behave, and go home.

We didn't.

But all that aside, why my mood?

Grim, determined.

Because if the wannabe tyrants of ISIS, AQ, etc., can hold on to a grudge going back hundreds of years in choosing the date of their slaughter, then we can certainly look back that far for inspiration.

If there's a better day to crank up Sabaton's "Winged Hussars", I don't know what is.