Has America Learned Nothing from 9/11?

I won't be watching television or listening to the radio on Sunday.  In fact, I turned them off this afternoon, unable to bear one more second of the media barrage, gearing up for the 10th year commemoration of the 9/11 tragedy.  I am not heartless.    I too mourn the deaths of its innocent victims.    But my sadness at the tragic loss of lives on September 11, 2001 is matched by another kind of grief.  It is that America may have learned little if anything from this watershed tragedy.     9/11 was not an unfathomable act of nature -- a hurricane- earthquake-tsunami-tornado event.  Rather, the September 11, 2001 attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon were masterminded by a former ally of the United States.   And why did the U.S. ally itself with Osama bin Laden, a man who never once hid the fact of his religious fanaticism?  It is because the White House deduced at the time that extremists would fight harder against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan than normal, mentally-stable Muslim leaders.  Like U.S. support of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and and other known psychopaths, these were Cold War tactical decisions.  Only, they backfired, or in U.S. intelligence parlance, they generated  "blowback."  

Of course none of us could have predicted the occurrence of the 9/11 tragedy.  But what price did we expect to pay for igniting proxy wars faro from America's borders and supporting sociopathic dictators?  Hundreds of thousands of civilians in these far off places have been bombed, tortured, or shot to death.  Did our leaders ignore the potential threat, assuming that nobody in those third world countries would have the technological-savvy to fight back on our home turf? 

Perhaps it's easier for America to sacralize its victimization, to build a national religion of martyrdom from the ashes of 9/11,  than find out why it happened in the first place.