The day that changed the world: five years after 9/11, the U.S. and the world are very different places.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: Cover story

We all remember where we were and what we were doing on Sept. 11, 2001, when 9/11 went from being just another date to a phrase that needs no explanation. From across the street or across the globe, we watched it all happen in real time. "It's like the day stood still," said Ed Lamm, who was working on Wall Street and witnessed the destruction in New York.

The horror began early that morning when 19 Islamic terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners on a mission of death. Two planes were flown into the World Trade Center in New York, striking the twin 110-story-tall towers like missiles. By 10:30 a:.m, both towers had collapsed.

An hour earlier, an American Airlines flight bound Los Angeles was flown into the Pentagon outside of D.C. And a fourth flight, United 93, had crashed in rural Pennsylvania, brought down as passengers tried to retake the plane. Authorities believe this plane was supposed to fly into the White House.

In all, 3,056 people perished that day--more than the number who died in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the highest one-day death toll on American soil since the Battle of Antielam during the Civil War.

But the damage went far beyond the death toll. The attacks seemed to change America's sense of security, our sense of invulnerability, even our attitude toward the world. And the attacks opened our eyes to the danger of Islamic terrorism. "September 11th was a foundational change; it woke us up to a new order in the world," says Michael Franc of the Heritage Foundation.

AMERICA RESPONDS

The decade before the attack seemed peaceful. Military spending was reduced after the Soviet Union's collapse and the end of the Cold War, leaving the U.S. as the world's only superpower. In reality, the threat of radical Islam--including Al Qaeda, a global network of Islamic terrorists, led by Osama bin Laden and motivated by an intense hatred of America and its policies--was already building. But the warning signs, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, were largely ignored.

The response to 9/11 was swift, with President Bush declaring a war on terror. Citing the need for new rules of warfare to tackle a faceless, stateless enemy, the administration adopted two key strategies. First, taking pre-emptive action against potential threats, before attacks on the U.S. could be carried out. And second, actively promoting the spread of democracy around the world, especially in the Middle East, as a long-term antidote to terrorism. "Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there," President Bush said a week after the attacks.

A month later, with the support of a broad international coalition, the U.S. sent troops to Afghanistan to topple the repressive Taliban regime, which had harbored Al Qaeda, and a new democratic government was set up. While Al Qaeda lost its primary base of operations, bin Laden has still escaped capture, and Taliban and Al Qaeda holdouts continue to fight to regain power.

In January 2002, the U.S. began holding prisoners, many captured in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo Bay, an American base in Cuba. The U.S. designated them "enemy combatants," rather than prisoners of war, which would have made them subject to the Geneva Convention's international standards of treatment.

In March 2003, an American-led coalition invaded Iraq. President Bush portrayed the war as part of the...