re: Costs
When your students come back and inform you that there are cultures on the Earth that will not suffer to breath the same air as ours, what then? You think there are no Arabic experts now, including Arabs?
Incidentally, it is estimated that the cost to New York alone of the 9/11 attack is in the neighborhood of $100 billion.
This story is just another expression of the delusion I'm seeing here that if we can just change the administration in our country, all the bad would go away. It's much more comforting than the alternatives. "There IS no war" is the last refuge of the mentally paralyzed.
Remember, Bush was not president when 9/11 was being planned.