VIDEO: How Would Things Have Changed If 9/11 Never Happened?

The 9/11 events have left a deep scar in everyone’s heart and mind all over the world.

That’s when everyone realized that no one is safe and that you never know when your country could be hit by such a tragedy.

Those events have changed a lot of things in the world and a lot of people have thought about how things would have been if 9/11 never happened.

According to washingtonpost.com, imagine that the twin towers still dominated the Manhattan skyline.

Imagine that the Pentagon’s western facade had remained intact. Imagine that there was no reason to build a memorial in Shanksville, Pa.

And imagine that the numbers 9 and 11 meant nothing more than an emergency telephone call.

So, with that in mind: What if the al-Qaeda attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, had never happened?

Of course, Osama bin Laden and his allies might have carried out another catastrophic and shocking attack.

Absent such an event, however, U.S. efforts against al-Qaeda might have continued in their more limited pre-9/11 forms: some drone strikes against al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan and Sudan, pressure on the Taliban to expel bin Laden, international intelligence and law enforcement cooperation.

We’d never have known the “war on terror” as an organizing principle of an entire presidential administration.

Without the catalyst of the attacks, Congress would not have undertaken the greatest reorganization of the national security bureaucracy since the Truman years, stitching together the Department of Homeland Security from nearly two dozen agencies.

Airline travel would still have its annoyances, but massively intrusive security screening might not be one of them.

No Sept. 11 means no invasion of Afghanistan, and possibly no invasion of Iraq.

At most, we might have seen covert actions and more cruise missile attacks, such as those the Clinton administration launched in 1998, against countries harboring bin Laden and his allies.

George W. Bush, like his father before him, might not have won reelection if the Democratic nominee had run a reprise of the 1992 Clinton campaign, with the message “it’s the economy, stupid.”

But that doesn’t mean America would have had a President John Kerry.

Kerry secured the Democratic nomination in 2004 in large part because primary voters believed that his war record and national security expertise made the Democrats less vulnerable to the claim that they were soft on terrorism.

Whether Dean, Kerry or someone else, the winning Democrat in 2004 would almost certainly have run for reelection in 2008.

That means Barack Obama might still be a senator from Illinois. There would have been no history-making first African American president.

Bottom line: Even without 9/11 and the subsequent wars, the United States still might be facing huge deficits — particularly if the Bush tax cuts had been enacted and if the stock and real estate bubbles had inflated and then popped, with disastrous effects for the global financial system and consumer demand.

Indeed, when historians write the actual — not counterfactual — history of our time, Sept.

11 might receive less attention than the crash of 2008, which produced the greatest global economic crisis since the Great Depression.