It’s been 10 years. America has waged two wars at a cost of 7,500 soldiers lives and more than a trillion dollars.

And as the nation remembered and grieved over 9/11 this past weekend, perhaps the saddest part—after a decade of such extraordinary expense and effort—is just how extraordinarily diminished this great country is.

There is a painful irony here. Let me explain.

This year, families of 9/11 victims have filed two unique and extremely important lawsuits—one back in May, the other last week—against an unusual defendant: the Islamic Republic of Iran.

You see, back in 2004, the National Commission tasked with examining the 9/11 attacks was behind schedule and nearing the end of a 60-day extension it had received to release its report. With just a week to go, staffers got new information—an intelligence bombshell: a National Security Agency summary of the American intelligence community’s findings on how Iran had helped the 9/11 hijackers. It was based on dozens of nsa documents that explained the al Qaeda-Tehran relationship.

Trouble was, there wasn’t enough time to fully process the explosive information before the report had to be published. Nevertheless, the authors hastily composed and included a page and a half about it under the subhead “Assistance from Hezbollah and Iran to al Qaeda” (you can read it in thispdf, pages 240-241); it described how Iran “frequently turned a blind eye” to recruiters, travel facilitators and document forgers streaming in and out of al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan; it also said Iran had covertly facilitated travel for several of the 9/11 hijackers in the months before the attack. The cia considered the information so touchy (in part because it exposed the cia’s failure to recognize in advance just how important it was) that it lobbied, unsuccessfully, to have it stricken from the report.

The 9/11 Commission was at the end of its mandate and left the matter with the words, “We believe this topic requires further investigation by the U.S. government.”

What an understatement. And yet—that “further investigation” didn’t happen.

It isn’t hard to figure why, with America already neck deep in Afghanistan and Iraq at the time. As the Trumpet had been writing for years by that point, Washington simply didn’t have the will to go after the “head of the snake”—the biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world. Here is what Gerald Flurry wrote in a co-worker letter in August 2004, after this revelation by the 9/11 Commission: “We and the world have now seen that Iran allowed 10 of the 9/11 terrorists to pass through their country on their way to attack America. Their passports were not stamped. Having their passports stamped in Iran would have aroused suspicion! The Iranian leaders didn’t want the world to see their tie to al Qaeda. That was an act of war. But America is too weak to fight Iran, and Iran is exploiting that deadly weakness.”

That analysis was deadly accurate. Seven years of subsequent federal inaction prove it all the more.

But that’s not the end of the story. Though Washington never conducted the investigation the 9/11 Commission called for, remarkably, some of the 9/11 victims’ families took it upon themselves to do so.

“We had no governmental authority, hardly any budget, and no access to classified intelligence or intelligence assets,” wrote Kenneth Timmerman, who helped in the effort. “But what we found and made public starting this May is enough to hang a fish.”

What they found forms the basis of their lawsuits against Iran. This legal team is convinced—based on years of research interviewing intelligence officials, cia agents, Iranian defectors and others—it can prove that the terrorists who plotted and carried out the 9/11 attacks were backed by Iran.

Ronen Bergman reports in Ynet News, “The huge amount of evidence included in the lawsuit comes together to form a fascinating charge: Starting in the 1990s, Iran and Hezbollah helped Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri create a new terror organization from scratch, to be headed by Afghanistan veterans and members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Iran trained group members, equipped them with advanced technological means, enabled them to move freely and provided them with plenty of terror-related expertise and experience accumulated by Hezbollah in its operations against Israel and the United States.”

“Put simply: The Islamic Republic of Iran helped design the 9/11 plot,” Timmerman states. Iran also “provided intelligence support to identify and train the operatives who carried it out.” Further, it helped the hijackers skirt U.S. and Pakistani surveillance—even on the fateful trip where bin Laden gave them final instructions—“by escorting them through Iranian borders without passport stamps.”

Assuming it all proves out, that’s no small measure of guilt. But then, after the attacks, the suits claim, Iran took in hundreds of top al Qaeda operatives from Afghanistan when the U.S. launched its war there, and has, for years since, supplied al Qaeda safe haven, financial support and even an operational base for further attacks.

It’s earth-shattering stuff. As Mr. Flurry said, 9/11 was a clear act of war. America answered the call—but all this evidence proves just what the Trumpet said right after that tragedy: It aimed at the wrong target.

“The case has far-reaching implications, which explain why the U.S. government is not eager” to examine the evidence, Bergman wrote (emphasis added throughout). “A ruling that Iran is linked to the attacks would pose a tough test to administration officials: On the one hand, they would not be able to ignore such [a] verdict. Yet on the other hand, what exactly will they do with it? Will they attack Iran, just as they invaded Afghanistan and Iraq?”

The answer to that question simply could not be more obvious.

Today, some families of 9/11 victims are still seeking justice—but the rest of the country has moved on. All people want is some kind of end to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As clean and tidy as possible, sure—but if not, what can you do? We’ve already spent 7,500 lives and a trillion dollars.

Clearly, there is nary a soul with a mind to actually attack Iran—are you kidding?

Bergman says Washington couldn’t ignore such a verdict. Wanna bet? Never mind what’s in the lawsuits. That information has been available for years. The government’s not interested.

Proof abounds of Iran waging direct war against American troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq—arming and training insurgents and so on. It doesn’t matter. We keep fighting with blinders on, pretending Iran isn’t involved.

In July, the Treasury Department directly linked al Qaeda with the Iranian government: “Iran is a critical transit point for funding to support al Qaeda’s activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” it wrote in a press release. “This network serves as the core pipeline through which al Qaeda moves money, facilitators and operatives from across the Middle East to South Asia ….” Wow—a smoking gun. So what did it do?

It forbade Americans from having commercial or financial dealings with six specific al Qaeda agents.

Iran has been waging war against America for ten years! (Or we could go back much further—1979.) It helped kill 3,000 Americans on 9/11. It has helped in killing thousands more on the battlefield since. It is bloodying America’s nose, trashing its reputation, burning its honor, and draining its treasury.

And America does nothing. Like a whipped dog.

Families of people who were murdered on 9/11 are left to filing lawsuits in district courts in Manhattan and Washington, d.c. “The families’ lawyers have asked for a default judgment against the defendants, which have not mounted a defense,” the New York Times blandly reported last May. “Even if there were such a judgment, legal experts say it would not be easy to collect monetary damages.”

That’s right. They’ll go through the proceedings and expose all this condemning information that the federal government has no interest in—perhaps they will secure a judgment that, in truth, was patently obvious a decade ago—and then … nothing. It’s not easy to collect monetary damages, you see. Don’t expect the government to demand that the ayatollah actually write these folks a check.

This is where we are, 10 years on.

This is why the saddest part of last weekend’s anniversary was the reality of how much this nation hasshrunk in the past decade.

And this is what makes for such painful irony. Because Iran—a nation whose fingerprints are all over the shattering tragedy of 9/11—is far stronger today than 10 years ago!

Yesterday cnn ran this gut-wrenching headline: “Iran winning from war on terror, analysts say.” The point is as sickening as it is hard to argue against. The benefit America has received for those 7,500 lives and trillion dollars is, well, dubious at best. For Iran, though, it has been a boon. By hammering two of Iran’s worst enemies, America actually laid a garlanded path for Iran’s rise.

Last week, American Thinker printed this: “Egyptian politician: U.S. is impotent against Iran.” This man—from a country that until recently was an American ally—wrote a column in an Iranian newspaper, openly mocking: “[T]he continued U.S.-Israeli banging on the drums of war against Iran is nothing more than empty threats;not only does it not strike fear in anyone’s heart, no one really believes it anymore.”

Piercing, painful truth. Why should it strike fear? Why would anyone believe it?

This past decade has essentially unfolded just as the Trumpet predicted within weeks of 9/11, based on the sure word of Bible prophecy. And still, that hasn’t made it any less bitter to witness.