2000s How the past 25 years divided and shaped our nation

"TUESDAY, September 11, 2001, temdawned perate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States": that sentence began the report of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission.

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GEORGE W. BUSH speaks about Iraq in 2003 with the infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner.

Since that terrible morning, 21st century Americans have faced some of the most alarming national security challenges and the worst sociopolitical strains - since the 1960s and beyond.

Nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists destroyed New York's World Trade Center, slammed a jetliner into the Pentagon and seem to have been prevented from demolishing the U.S. Capitol only by the heroic passengers on United Flight 93. The largest terrorist attacks in U.S. history ended a post-Cold War idyll that lasted from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the collapse of the Twin Towers.

Republicans called the 1990s a "holiday from history" - but after 9/11, history roared back. "The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama," Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1952, "have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning." That September morning was the first of a drumbeat of huge, early 21st century events that corroded public trust among America's increasingly polarized citizenry. After al-Qaeda's attacks, President George W.

Bush stretched the presidency's writ and pushed the envelope of legality -to prosecute a war on terrorism, including new surveillance powers and the torture of some al-Qaeda detainees.

Bush fought a war of necessity to oust al-Qaeda's Taliban hosts in Afghanistan, but he also embarked on a war of choice to topple Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq. "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program," Bush said. It was not.