True, true, sorry, my America-centrism is showing.

Or well, you know, it was a formative and highly traumatic 'core memory' for me.

And, at the time, we were the largest economy in the world, and that event broke our collective minds, and reoriented that economy, and our society, down a dark path that only ended up causing waste, death and destruction.

Imagine the timeline where Gore won, not Bush, and all the US really did was send in a specops team to Afghanistan to get Bin Laden, as opposed to occupy the whole country, never did Iraq 2.

Thats... a lot of political capital and money that could have been directed to... anything else, i dunno, maybe kickstarting a green energy push?