I have nothing useful to add to the worldwide commentary on this fifth anniversary of September 11, 2001.

But I can’t help wondering what things will be like five years further into the future, on the tenth anniversary of that awful day. What will we be talking about? What kind of perspective will we have on an event that will have taken place half-a-lifetime ago for the young adults of 2011? What will we think about the manner in which we’ve conducted ourselves in the intervening years?

Five years from now, George Bush will be out of office; if you’d like a minute-by-minute countdown of his remaining term in office, you can even get a Bush Countdown Clock. Whoever replaces him will be nearing the end of his or her first term, and will be getting ready for the election campaign of 2012. Will he/she still be warning us not to “cut and run” from Iraq? For that matter, will there even be an Iraq in 2011, or will it have splintered into three or more ethnic regions? I have no idea who will be elected in 2008, nor do I know what the next U.S. President will do about America’s presence in Iraq. But there are three obvious examples from past history that we we should keep in mind: Vietnam, South Korea, and the vanquished nations of World War II.

We lost in Vietnam, and we no longer have any soldiers there (unless there are some covert operatives that I haven’t heard about). Arguably, the Korean War was a stalemate, without even a formal treaty or truce; but some 50+ years later, we still have 37,500 troops there. And while we defeated Japan and Germany in World War II, we still have (as of 2004) 71,000 troops in Germany, and 47,000 in Japan — and varying numbers of troops in some 93 countries around the world. (See “We Have How Many Troops in Europe?” for details on the numbers.) It’s not very pleasant to contemplate a Vietnam-style defeat in Iraq, but past history sure does make me pretty skeptical about the rhetoric about how the U.S. will “stand down” as the Iraqi Army “stands up.”

And if we are still running around in Iraq, guarding oil pipelines, shooting at insurgents, and doing our best to keep our soldiers from being blown up, what will day-to-day life be like — for them, and for the rest of us back home? Is it possible that we will have incorporated all of that into the day-to-day humdrum of our lives, just another piece of background noise that we absorb along with the daily statistics about traffic fatalities, bank robberies, drive-by shootings, and drug busts? I was stunned today by Tim O’Reilly’s “Laptops at War” blog posting, which pointed me to a series of Doonesbury cartoons (start with the link, and then tab “forward” to more recent entries) commenting on how soldiers stationed in Iraq have incorporated laptops, text-messaging, video chats, and the Internet into their lives, so they can maintain some degree of a “normal” domestic relationship (including all of the usual day-to-day bickering) while they fight their war.

Is this really what the future is going to be like? Remember: Moore’s Law says that our computer technology in 2011 will be approximately ten times faster, cheaper, and better than what we have now. For all we know, the soldiers of 2011 will have fully-equipped computers built into their helmets, with high-resolution displays built into their eyeglasses or goggles, and a voice-recognition user-interface that eliminates the need for keyboard and mouse. But the insurgents, terrorists, and miscellaneous citizens of Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, and other third-world countries will also have dramatically better technology; if Nicholas Negroponte succeeds with his $100-laptop project (see my April 14th blog posting on “Ubiquitous Computing” for more details about this), then it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that citizens all around the world will have access to $10 computers in 2011. Will such a development make things better or worse?

For me, one of the saddest things about this five-year anniversary of September 11th is the degree to which I’ve lost faith in, and respect for, politicians of every major party, as well as the official and unofficial “leaders” of the nation’s government agencies (including the Senate, House, Executive branch, and judicial branches of government), public institutions, media/press, major business organizations, and even sports stars. We can debate why it happened, when it happened, and how it happened — but it is what it is, and I’ve got to live my life on a day-to-basis on the assumption that I can’t really trust any of the information I’m receiving from these “official” sources, unless I can verify it personally.

But the real question is: will this loss of trust deteriorate even further by September 11, 2011 — or will something happen to turn things around, so that we can begin to look forward to a society populated by honest men and women with good intentions?