I remember where I was when the first plane hit the tower. I was in the car driving to work, and Fox News Radio broke in on whichever music station I was listening to. The announcer said a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York in what was being seen as one of the worst aviation accidents in history.

It didn’t take long for that to get corrected.

In the aftermath of 9/11, we heard a lot of exhortations to do normal things, not to panic, to continue going shopping and frequent public places. Because not to do those things meant that the terrorists would have won.

We followed that advice. But the terrorists won anyway.

They won because our leadership missed the opportunity to see 9/11 for what it was. It was an attack by one civilization against another. Non-state actors, to be sure, though there were people within the Saudi government who helped them, but Osama bin Laden’s minions who perpetrated 9/11 were civilizational actors.

They might have been deranged lunatics, but they were lunatics following the dogma of a very well-established religious and political philosophy which has existed on this planet for more than 1400 years. Islam commands its followers to kill and intimidate infidels until there are no more infidels, and bin Laden’s plan was to strike down the most prominent symbols of America’s commercial, military and political power. But for the heroic Americans on Flight 93 who saved the Capitol by storming the cockpit and killing the hijackers, they would have succeeded in all three – though most of the Pentagon survived the attack and was quickly rebuilt.

And in the days following 9/11, we papered over what really happened. We never elevated the discussion to the level it belonged.

9/11 should have resulted in a national – international – boycott of Middle Eastern oil. It should have resulted in a massive about-face of U.S. energy policy toward nuclear power. It should have resulted in alternative methods of making motor fuel; that can be done with natural gas and coal, but isn’t.

We should have pulled out of the Middle East. Not just militarily; culturally and commercially. The result of 9/11 should have been that we cut Islam off from the benefits of Western civilization and embarked on a plan to force it to wither and die.

To go to Afghanistan and punish the Taliban for harboring al-Qaeda? Of course. Install the Northern Alliance in power in Kabul.

And then that’s it.

We didn’t shut down a single mosque in this country. We should have shut them all down and kicked every single non-citizen Muslim out of the country. Thomas Jefferson, faced as president with the problem of the Barbary pirates capturing American ships on the high seas and enslaving their crews, and told that this was being done in pursuance of Islamic jihad, read the Quran.

And then he declared war on the Barbary pirates, because he knew what he was up against. Two hundred years later, our government officials lied to us and told us that Islam was the Religion of Peace.

While they passed the Patriot Act and gave us the TSA.

There will never be a successful hijacking of a passenger jet again. The shoe bomber proved that; he was beaten half to death by the people on that flight. On the morning of September 11, 2001, the paradigm for being on a commercial flight and somebody rushes the cockpit was that you’re better off sitting still and waiting it out, because maybe they’ll redirect the plane to Havana or Tripoli and then you can go home. But after the first three planes hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the world changed, and the new paradigm is that if they rush the cockpit it’s now kill or be killed, and four guys with box cutters yelling “Allahu Akbar” have no chance against 200 passengers fighting for their lives.

We didn’t need the TSA. The TSA has destroyed air travel in this country. It’s an absolutely miserable experience and it has been for 25 years. Thanks to 9/11 and our response to it there have been no meaningful improvements to that mode of transportation, because we’re so afraid of another 9/11 that it colors every aspect of engineering, logistics and design of airports, planes, and everything else surrounding air travel.

We certainly didn’t need the Patriot Act, which was shortly – and inevitably – turned on our people.

Meanwhile, the number of mosques in this country has multiplied. The number of Muslims has mushroomed thanks to wide-open borders. We now have 11 Muslim mayors across America, including in the city 9/11 affected most. The muezzin’s call to prayer rings out in parts of New York, which is a victory for Islam that never should have been allowed. In Texas they’re terrified Sharia law is creeping into daily life, as is halal food.

And the hijab. Which you see in big cities all over the country. Even the governor of New York wears one.

It’s a quarter of a century later in this country after the worst civilizational attack we’ve ever faced (Pearl Harbor was a military attack, not a civilizational and cultural one, and Japan was trying to knock us out of a war rather than suck us into one, though they failed spectacularly), and we can’t point to a single course correction which shows us stronger vis-a-vis the civilization that attacked us than we were on September 10, 2001.

We threw the Taliban out of Kabul; they’re back in control.

We attacked Iraq, which had nothing meaningful to do with 9/11, and wasted trillions of dollars trying to build a Western democracy there. Iraq is a functional democracy by Middle Eastern standards, but it’s no ally of ours and it’s heavily influenced by Iran, who we only really meaningfully addressed this year, in a war which might ultimately prove fruitful but for which the American people have almost no appetite at all.

Islam’s influence in this country should have waned to zero after 9/11, the minute Americans found out enough about its doctrine to realize that what al-Qaeda had done was not outside the bounds of Quranic scripture. Instead, our politicians embraced a saccharine version of it as a partner for peace and wasted blood and treasure on lies, while embracing Muslims as a voting bloc to compete for.

And despite the best efforts of many to bring a resurgence of Christianity, without which we will not withstand the long march of Islam into our civilization, there is no institutional support of note for reinstalling this as a Christian nation with the fortitude and spirit to win the civilizational challenge 9/11 presented to us.

Everything about the last 25 years has shown us unserious about that civilizational challenge. Our military heroes did everything we asked them to do but our political leadership was grossly unsuited to the task of a long fight, and we have lost ground. Half of us still think America and the West can move forward with Muslims playing a prominent role in our national discussion. That Queers for Palestine isn’t an absurdity. That Abdul El-Sayed and Hasan Piker have a place in American politics. That the call to prayer audible on our streets is a victory rather than a defeat.

When across the Atlantic we’re seeing the truth. Which is rape gangs and acid attacks.

It isn’t a failure of technology, or of philosophy, or of military strength. It’s a failure of civilizational will.  It’s a failure of decadence, of weakness of spirit.

We have not sufficiently honored those murdered on 9/11. We have not won the quarter-century which has unfolded in its wake. And on this 25th anniversary that is a shame.