By TERENCE HUNT

AP White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON (AP) — Dead or alive.

President Bush said he didn’t care how terrorism architect Osama bin Laden was brought to justice.

“We’ll smoke him out of his cave and we’ll get him eventually,” Bush said confidently.

That was back in 2001 when the U.S. reeled in shock and horror after 19 men hijacked four airliners and turned them into guided missiles. The jets slammed into New York’s World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside, killing nearly 3,000 people in the deadliest attack in history on U.S. soil.

It was the beginning of a new era of anxiety and vulnerability for the country after only a few years of post-Cold War comfort. Americans suddenly woke up to the chilling threat of terrorism — not in the Middle East or somewhere else around the world, but here, at home.

It was a turning point, too, for Bush, an inexperienced, little-traveled president who had shown marginal interest in world affairs.

Before Sept. 11, Bush was best known for winning his office in a controversial Supreme Court decision and then cajoling Congress into passing one of the largest tax cuts in history and enacting a major education bill.

After Sept. 11, Bush declared himself a wartime president. He denounced “evildoers” and launched a global war on terrorism. He rallied the nation and the world; his approval ratings soared into the stratosphere.

Now, on the seventh anniversary of Sept. 11, Bush winds down his presidency with those attacks and the aftermath standing as the defining events of his time in office.

“You have to view this as the seminal event of his presidency,” said Norman Ornstein, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. “It transformed him, it focused him and gave a sense of purpose to his presidency that really had not existed before.”

Suddenly, Ornstein said, Bush’s mission was clear: “Fight a war against terror and win it.”

The president laid the groundwork for two wars in close succession, in Afghanistan and then Iraq. Today, he still is carrying the burden of those wars, still not won, and a tarnished U.S. image around the globe. Critics blame him for allowing people to be tortured, for domestic spying and for abuses of executive power.

Bush sent U.S. troops into Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001, to strike al-Qaida training camps and remove the Taliban rulers who harbored bin Laden. The Taliban fell quickly. Bin Laden slipped away.