The question needs to be asked: 'how exactly?'

AT 9.45am on September 11, 2001, all airspace over the contiguous United States was closed to non-military traffic.

Phone networks started to crash. There were rumours that, besides those that crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, there were perhaps nine other passenger jets unaccounted for. The only thing New Yorkers saw flying overhead were F-15 interceptors designed to dogfight with Soviet MiGs, impotently patrolling against threats they were too late to imagine.

Panic buying began at petrol stations. In Iowa, the price shot up from $1.60 to $4.65 a gallon in a few hours.

Reports of random attacks on people who looked like Arabs. Tentative steps to restore normality. Then came envelopes with weaponised anthrax, still unexplained, delivered to public figures.

This was the future. First for the US and then the rest.

Global economic collapse.

Sealed borders. Price controls enforced at gunpoint.

Rationing. Riots.

Instead, something really weird happened. Nothing.

Well, not nothing. There was a well-planned, well-executed campaign that, with minimal use of US ground troops, collapsed the Taliban regime on the other side of the planet, and put those responsible for 9/11 on the run, hiding in caves where they remain to this day.

There were other attacks.

London, Madrid, Turkey, Indonesia. But these were not orchestrated, the consensus says, by Osama bin Laden. He no longer has that power. And none on US soil.

There was an incompetently planned, disastrously executed campaign to replace Saddam Hussein with a liberal democratic government, the shame of which I share. But the real story of the last five years is what didn't happen.

Why didn't the global economy collapse? Moreover, why didn't the US change to something resembling a war footing? The Bush administration insisted, in the midst of the crisis, on pushing through tax cuts. This was insane.

Where were the calls for blood, toil, tears and sweat?

Production didn't much switch to weapons. It switched to iPods, Blackberries and dual-core microprocessors.

US immigration did pioneer new ways to annoy travellers.

We were so enthralled by "horror" stories on talk radio of d-list celebs so delayed that they missed an Oscars party that we didn't think to marvel that a country which had just suffered the worst one-day total of civilian casualties in its history as the result of an act of war was: a) letting foreigners enter in large numbers . . . for a party; b) having the Oscars at all; and c) allowing people to bitch about their inconvenience without fear of non-verbal reprisal.

Far from shutting down to the world, the US opened itself up even wider, via under-used fibreoptic cables laid on the ocean floors during the late 1990s, allowing Indians in Bangalore to outbid US competitors.

Even air travel, which many otherwise sane people predicted would never recover, confounded. Partly because, like fibre-optic cable, planes were now going cheap.

More than 3.4bn passengers flew in 2003, up 2% from 2002, according to the Airports Council International, "despite the sluggish global economy, the Iraq conflict and the outbreak of SARS. This brings traffic back to 2000 levels."

Imagined petrol shortages turned out to have been caused by pipelines jammed with jet fuel not being used. On 17 Sept, George W Bush made his first major speech after the attacks . . . not before Congress, he did that four days later . . . at the Washington Islamic Centre.

"Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes, " he said. "Moms who wear cover must be not intimidated in America. That's not the America I know. That's not the America I value."

Officials made it known that despite the investigation into the attacks themselves, 10% of FBI resources would fight any hate crimes against Muslims. Attacks virtually ceased.

This speech and policy almost certainly deserves some credit in explaining why, as opposed to alienated Muslims in Britain, Spain, France and Germany, US Muslims did not emulate al-Qaeda types . . . or harbour them.

Sometimes it seems the Bush administration is determined to wreck whatever magic made this possible. So the fact that . . . despite Washington's best efforts . . . the world of September 10, 2006, so closely resembles the world of September 10, 2001, is a phenomenon surely worthy of some note.

rdelevan@tribune. ie