It's always good to think back on that amazing moment when George W. Bush resigned from office. After a series of dramatic, utterly preventable disasters happened on his watch, he was candid and courageous enough to say "Sorry, I'm in over my head, folks. It's back to Texas and booze for me." Without this handsome and congenial-seeming front man, the public soon had its fill of the condescending, backroom-dealing Dick Cheney as a figurehead, and by 2004 the Republican party was history.
It's also a credit to this great nation that the people had the patience to wait for the US to bring the attackers' co-conspirators to justice, through a combination of detective work and building bridges to international law enforcement agencies.
I would have expected Americans to act like a bunch of enraged apes, screeching "REVENGE, REVENGE" at the tops of their lungs, and that's not what happened. Fighting an invisible enemy by waging wars against scapegoat nations would have been the height of wasteful folly.