And the Sky Swept Clear of Angels : 9/11, 5 Years, and Lost Worlds

Though exiled to the swamps of New Jersey, I am a native New Yorker; and so this date arrives every year like a punch in the gut. I no longer think of the attacks every day, but it took 18 months before that ceased. When I do think of them, I am immediately transported back to the moments the Towers fell, and I am nearly overcome again by shock and grief. The victims at the Pentagon and on Flight 93, and their families, deserve our respect and our sympathy; but for me, 9/11 was and is and will always be about an attack on my city — the most primal fear of the civilized human.

It can be argued — and has been argued, and most likely is right now being argued over — whether the same horrific events would have unfolded had someone else occupied the White House. I make no secret of my disdain for the current President and his cronies but I think that that particular barb is misplaced. Al Qaeda found a long-standing blind spot in our thinking and exploited it, and — except for the sensitive dependence on initial conditions that rules intelligence work — I doubt a President Gore would have averted or mitigated the attack any more than President Bush did. George W. Bush bears no responsibility for the horror of 9/11.

But he bears ultimate and direct responsibility for the squandering of the unique historical moment that followed. Do you remember “We are all Americans”? The French — the French declared that. Do you remember messages of sorrow and sympathy from capitals who daily denounced us as the Great Satan? Do you remember the upwelling of real human sympathy on the “world street” — where people spontaneously demonstrated in support of the United States rather than against it?

What did that upwelling mean? What was Le Monde saying, when it said “We are all Americans”? Clearly they weren’t petitioning Congress for admission as the 51st state. They were speaking a more abstract truth. At that moment, the whole world understood that we had been attacked in a brash strike against the very idea of civilization. America as a nation came closest to embodying world civilization. We have always been a country more of ideas than of borders — we loudly proclaim at every opportunity — and the ideas are those of humanity: freedom, tolerance, peace. We had been attacked for those ideals, and those ideals were the linchpin of the global community. When Le Monde said, “We are all Americans”, they meant, “We are all human” — we are all in this together.

And for a brief time, it seemed that was the case. Almost reflexively, the nations of the world came together. New systems to track and starve terrorist funding arose overnight. Countries with decades or even centuries of distrust began sharing intelligence. Thinkers and artists challenged the soft terrorists, the ones who stay at home and provide the intellectual cohesion that allows a movement to metastasize. And at the same moment, the peoples of the world drew sharp distinction between anger for the outlaws who perpetrated such acts and the adherents of the religion they bastardized to justify it.

Al Qaeda punched open a hole in my skyline. But they also, incidentally, punched open a hole in the world, through which the future was going to seep. It looked, for that brief moment, like the world would step through that hole together into a wiser, brighter future — where the immune systems of world civilization would aggressively root out that virus on the body politic, terrorism. Not only through strong deeds but through strong thought: Immediate action to punish the immediately guilty; smart and compassionate attention to the root causes of the problem.

And for leadership in these parlous times, when the very concept of civilization was reeling under hammer blows by the new barbarians, everyone, everywhere, instinctively looked — as the world has for over a century — to the American President.

But he let them down. He let us down. He and his cronies, compulsively unilateralist, threw away the goodwill. I used to think that the Bush administration irrationally distrusted the whole world, but I was wrong. They irrationally distrust everyone — their fellow citizens included — and they take all that trust they’re not investing, and focus it on themselves. Only by absorbing a world’s worth of trust could one exhibit a delusional faith in oneself and one’s conclusions, as these guys have done. If the world said move one way, they were sure as hell going to move the other.

So this President, who preaches compassion, authorized torture and other degrading treatment. So this Administration, which preaches freedom, claims absolute and unchecked power for its own hands. So this cabal, which preaches optimism, drills its citizenry in fear. So this majority Party, which preaches democracy, disenfranchises hundreds of thousands and changes the rules in a desperate attempt to cling to power. So this majority in Congress, which preaches liberty, moves to surrender its oversight powers — when it can be stirred to move at all.

And so this President — with the entire nation, no, world supporting the overwhelming application of force in an aggressive action to root out Al Qaeda and bring the perpetrators to justice — opts instead to drag his country into a war of choice launched under false pretenses against someone who had nothing at all to do with the attack on 9/11 … so that this President can prove he’s a tougher hombre than his dad, and so that this President’s Vice President’s company can reap untold billions in no-bid contracting.

There are two sins associated with 9/11. The first is the attack itself. The second is the skewed response of the Bush administration and its almost willful sacrifice of a hopeful future on the altar of its own delusions.