What's 9/11 to you?

Heck, I'm a New Yorker, and 9/11 is a kind of distant, smoky memory to me -- watching the Twin Towers belch plumes of dark smoke one Tuesday morning and wondering how long it'll take to fix them up, now that they've got those big holes in them.
It wasn't really spectacular until the towers FUCKING FELL DOWN. Holy shit, until then it was just drama -- a Hollywood disaster movie reality show. Then they FUCKING FELL DOWN. There was blue sky where they once stood. That was the big shift in consciousness -- what man had built, fell down to nothingness, a heap of smoldering cinders. Motherfucking Godzilla-monstrously huge concrete monuments blown out of the NY skyline, forever erased.
And now, kinda distant, like when you're forty, recalling your first kiss or fuck.

1. 9/11 not a signpost in most North Americans' lives, study shows – by Ryan Smith (ryan.smith@ualberta.ca)

Almost five years ago, when two planes slammed into the World Trade Centre towers in New York, we were told that our lives had changed forever--but, as it turns out, not so much.

"The clichÈ we were hearing all over the place was 'Everything is different now,'" said University of Alberta psychology professor Dr. Norman Brown. "But just because there's a shocking and dramatic news story doesn't mean everything is different. Instead what it means is that your opinions might shift a little, your values might shift a little, and then come back to where they started. People feel bad for a few days, maybe a few weeks, they may feel insecure, but on the other hand, almost everybody continues to go on with their own lives."

Brown's view is based on research he has conducted to figure out whether momentous events in history have an impact on how people sort and store their own memories. While everyone may know where they were when John F. Kennedy was assassinated or the planes hit the World Trade Centre in New York, we don't reference those events to things that happen in our everyday lives, said Brown.

Brown conducted his research by asking neutral, non-event specific questions to trigger participants' personal memories. He cross-referenced his results among research participants living in Edmonton, Alberta; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and New York City, New York. It might seem like a no-brainer to assume that those people who lived in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, would have many references to that date in their personal archives. According to Brown, the assumption is wrong.

"You could pretty much get the same results in Manhattan that you get in Edmonton or Ann Arbor," said Brown. "Nine-eleven was the thing that was supposed to turn everybody on their heads, but according to our results it didn't."

Less than a one-per-cent of participants used the occurrence of a historical event to reference a personal memory, with the Olympics as likely to show up as 9/11.

To imprint itself on a population's collective memory, an event has to be so life-altering that it changes everything about one's day-to-day life, Brown said.

"There's a difference between a public event which affects you in terms of how you feel, or even how you think, and public events which affect you, in terms of what you do--what everybody does," he said, adding that the situation must also have a dramatic swing back to normalcy to act as contrast.

Brown's evidence of this is the response he received to his neutral questions from research participants in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Between 1992 and 1995, the Bosnian War in and around Sarajevo resulted in large scale destruction and death.

"The estimates vary, but somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people were killed--from a population of about 3 million people. It was atrocious, a real bloodbath," said Brown.

Twenty-seven per cent of respondents in Sarajevo mentioned that war as a reference to define a personal memory, and 80 per cent of them mentioned the war if the memory referenced--for example, their wedding--happened during the war.

"When public events change the fabric of your daily life and do it for an entire group of people, a population, that's when you see these tie in to personal memory. If your country is engaged in a war--where you live might change, who you socialize with might change, where you work might change, what you eat might change, educational opportunities might change--all the basic elements of what you do on a daily basis could change--and then some change back."

"I was trying to understand when it is that historical process starts to blend with autobiographical memories, because, generally speaking, the two are independent," said Brown. "So, we went to a place where history and autobiographical memory are necessarily going to be intertwined--where, to live, you're living in history."

(Brown and his colleagues have presented this research at a number of conferences, the latest being the International Conference on Memory in Sydney, Australia, July 2006. Dr. Brown can be reached at 780-492-4604 or norman.brown@ualberta.ca)


2. A nation once joined together in shock and vulnerability is now riven by failure and recrimination (from The Economist)

ON THE morning of September 12th 2001, Americans woke up to a changed country. They had seen the twin towers of the World Trade Centre reduced to rubble, the Pentagon aflame and a field in Pennsylvania transformed into a graveyard. Almost 3,000 people had been killed and twice as many injured, in the bloodiest day on American soil since the battle of Antietam in 1862. They had seen their president—the most powerful man in the world—flitting from pillar to post. And they had seen the face of a new enemy. Before September 11th few people even in the administration had heard of al-Qaeda. After that day there was no getting away from the images of Osama bin Laden and his agent, Mohammed Atta.

That September 11th changed America dramatically is hardly open to debate: George Bush's presidency has been about little else since then. But some of the changes have been unexpected. Who would have guessed, as a shocked country rallied round the flag, that five years later partisan divisions would be deeper than ever? Who would have guessed, as the president pledged that “the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon,” that five years later Mr bin Laden would still be at liberty and America would be bogged down in Iraq?

The immediate result of September 11th was a surge in national unity. The country was draped in flags. Wal-Mart sold 116,000 of them on September 11th and 250,000 the day after. The mood killed partisan politics. Congressman Dick Armey, a firebrand conservative, put an arm around Maxine Waters, a firebrand congresswoman on the left. Mr Bush embraced Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader, on the Senate floor. Conservatives denounced Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, two evangelical broadcasters, for entertaining the notion that September 11th was God's punishment of “the pagans, and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and lesbians”. Leftists excoriated Susan Sontag for implying that the assault was payback for America's crimes.

The attacks brought an abrupt end to the “holiday from history” that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. They also brought an abrupt end to America's sense of invulnerability: for all its military might and oceanic moats, the country was wide open to attack from fanatics living in caves in Afghanistan.

All this produced a mood of soul-searching. A Newsweek cover article asked, “Why do they hate us?” and books on Islam topped the bestseller lists. It also produced something more visceral: a desire for revenge. Three days after the attacks the congregation in the National Cathedral in Washington, DC , concluded a memorial service for those who had died with the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”.

The administration capitalised on the more vengeful mood to produce a wide-ranging response. On September 11th Mr Bush concluded that America was at war. That day, too, he stated that he would make no distinction between terrorists and those who harboured them. This rapidly became the “Bush doctrine”. America would not wait for the next attack: it would take the war to the enemy. That did not mean al-Qaeda alone. Any state sponsoring terrorists or supplying them with weapons of mass destruction ( WMD ) would be dealt with, even before the threat was fully developed. And America would not simply treat symptoms. It would tackle the causes of Islamic terrorism.

Strong, but vulnerable

The doctrine drew on two contradictory beliefs: that America was mighty enough to reorder the world and that it was vulnerable to still worse attacks. Vice-President Dick Cheney then enunciated his own policy, known as the “1% doctrine”: if there were even a 1% chance of terrorists getting hold of WMD, America would act as if it were a certainty.

September 11th gave an enormous boost to Mr Bush. In the aftermath of the attacks, the percentages of Americans who told pollsters they approved of him shot up from the 50s to the 90s, the highest scores ever recorded for a president. His ratings remained above 60% for 16 months, the longest boom in presidential popularity since the second world war. And September 11th strengthened Mr Bush in a more personal way: the frat boy who had grown up in the shadow of his over-achieving father acquired a new steel and a new determination.

The administration relentlessly used the president's popularity to strengthen the power of the executive. In the wake of September 11th it engineered the biggest expansion in executive power since the days of Franklin Roosevelt. Mr Bush declared himself a “war president”. And he took a series of decisions that were to come back to haunt him—from monitoring telephone calls without explicit approval from the courts to establishing military tribunals. Even when he was guaranteed a rubber stamp from a compliant Congress, he preferred to go it alone. Chuck Hagel, a Republican senator, grumbled that the administration treated Congress like a “constitutional nuisance”.

Reporting for defeat

At the same time September 11th strengthened the Republicans while weakening the Democrats. In the second half of the 20th century the Republicans had come to be seen as the more trustworthy party in matters of national security. In 2001 the Democrats were conscious of that but could not decide what to do about it. First, they tried to change the subject to their strong suits, health and education, and then, when they chose John Kerry to be their presidential candidate, overcompensated by turning their 2004 convention in Boston into a Vietnam veterans' rally. There Mr Kerry, saluting his audience, introduced himself with the words, “Reporting for duty.”

The Republicans made strong advances in the 2002 mid-term elections, solidifying their control over the House and capturing the Senate. It was only the third time since the civil war that the president's party had gained seats in mid-term elections. And Mr Bush won the 2004 presidential election with more votes than any president in history. September 11th drove both victories. When it came to “keeping America strong”, the opinion polls showed the Republicans with a lead of almost 40 points in 2002. At the Republican convention in New York two years later, every speaker, most powerfully Rudy Giuliani, who had been the city's heroic mayor in 2001, invoked the lessons of that day of fire.

The bipartisan feelings that followed September 11th could hardly have lasted for ever. But it is still surprising how far the warm courage of national unity has turned into fiery partisanship. The change was first seen in Howard Dean's revolt against the Democratic establishment as he sought the party's presidential nomination—an establishment which, in his view, had allowed Mr Bush to turn the terrorist attacks into a carte blanche for his party. And it continues to drive not just politics but also popular culture. Neil Young, whose 2001 song “Let's Roll” paid tribute to the bravery of the passengers who stormed the hijackers on the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania, is now singing about impeaching the president.

The main cause of this partisanship is the Iraq war, which is proving even more divisive than Vietnam. Immediately after September 11th Americans were ready to blame Saddam Hussein: in a poll taken two days later 34% of respondents thought it “very likely” that he had been personally involved and 44% thought it “somewhat likely”. Large majorities of both political parties—80% of Republicans and 69% of Democrats—backed the war with Iraq.

But conservative hawks were always keenest on making the link. At a meeting in Camp David just after September 11th Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defence secretary, argued three times that America should attack Iraq rather than Afghanistan. And many Democrats were always sceptical: 126 Democratic House members and 21 senators voted against the Iraqi war resolution in October 2002. Democratic opposition to the war expanded as America failed to get UN approval for deposing Mr Hussein. And it turned to fury when America failed to find WMD or to quell the resistance. Today nothing inspires more anger on the left than the belief that Mr Bush exploited September 11th to justify long-laid plans to remove the Iraqi president.

Still, there is more to America's polarisation than Iraq. The partisanship has been partly driven by political opportunism, as the Republicans have tried to turn September 11th into a vote-winner. How could the Democrats forgive the Republicans for branding Max Cleland, a man who lost three limbs in Vietnam, as being too soft on terrorism to be worthy of re-election to his Georgia Senate seat in 2002? But the split has also been driven by deep philosophical differences, briefly suppressed, about America's role in the world.

Might isn't right

The American left, in particular, has reverted to its pre-September 11th, and perhaps even pre-Clinton, suspicion of American power. A survey conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in November 2005 found that only 59% of Democrats still supported the decision to invade Afghanistan, compared with 94% of Republicans. A survey by the Century Foundation asked left-wingers and conservatives to rate their two main foreign-policy goals. Conservatives put destroying al-Qaeda at the top of their list; leftists put it at number ten.

It is tempting to argue that the most remarkable thing about September 11th, five years on, is how little it has changed America. Many features of the political landscape are much as they were on September 10th—a polarising president, an electorate divided almost 50-50 in terms of party allegiance, a Republican Party that loves to wrap itself in the flag and a Democratic Party more worried about outsourcing than terrorism. But look more deeply and you find dramatic changes.

The main one is a new emphasis on national security. In 2000, despite a series of increasingly devastating terrorist attacks, including the first bombing of the World Trade Centre, only 12% of Americans cited “world affairs” as a “paramount issue”. Today they are central.

The shadow of September 11th will hang over the mid-term elections. Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, argues that the big question in November is, “Do you believe we're at war?” The Democrats fight back by arguing that, thanks to his war in Iraq and neglect of security at home, Mr Bush is making America less safe.

September 11th may also hang over the 2008 presidential election. John McCain (tortured by the Vietnamese) and Mr Giuliani (a stirring September 11th performance), two of the Republican front-runners, boast perfect credentials for the new terror-racked world. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, has been burnishing her own tough-gal credentials on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The concentration on national security reflects a second big change: America's new but continuing sense of vulnerability. This has deepened over the years. The war in Iraq has proved how difficult it is for America to use its military might to change the world. The fiasco of failing to find any WMD in Iraq underlined the weakness of its intelligence services. The response to Hurricane Katrina showed dramatically what several congressional reports had already pointed out: that the administration had done little to prepare for another catastrophic attack.

Lastly, September 11th has turned the Bush presidency into a big deal. Before the aircraft struck, Mr Bush looked like a small-bore president—divisive, to be sure, but divisive about little things. On the morning of September 11th Mr Bush was reading “My Pet Goat” to a class of second-graders. His speech-writer, Michael Gerson, was working on a speech on “Communities of Character”. America is now as divided as possible about Mr Bush. His supporters regard him as a “transformative” figure like Ronald Reagan. His critics view him as a catastrophe—possibly the worst president in American history, according to Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian. But, thanks to September 11th, nobody can dismiss him as a mere footnote.


3. Life, liberty and politics after 9/11
Nadine Strossen, Faisal Devji, Jeffrey Rosen, Brendan O'Neill, Michael Baum and others discuss the legacy of the terror attacks (from the excellent Spiked.com)

spiked has invited writers, thinkers and activists to outline what they think has been the most enduring legacy – if any – of the attacks on New York and Washington five years ago. We want to hear your views, too. This page will be updated over the next week; to contribute, email Brendan O’Neill at Brendan.ONeill@spiked-online.com .

The real message of 9/11: feel our pain, by Brendan O’Neill

The attacks on New York and Washington were ultimately an attempt to win the flattery of the West rather than the destruction of the West. Too many analysts and commentators have asked ‘What does al-Qaeda want?’, as if this group – such as it exists – has tangible political demands or goals. In fact, bin Laden and Co.’s terrorism is a plea for attention, for the recognition of their alleged pain and suffering. In this sense, it fits in very well with today’s culture of complaint, where individuals and groups represent themselves as victims whose suffering must be recognised rather than as active agents who want to change or reshape society.

Over the past five years bin Laden has chopped and changed his justifications for 9/11. One month he says it was executed ‘for the Palestinians’, the next he says it was for the liberation of Saudi Arabia. But the one constant in his messages is the idea that the West doesn’t treat Muslim victims with the same respect that it treats Western victims. In October 2001 he said, ‘Millions of Muslims are being killed. Where are the comments of the educated? Where are the writers? Where are the scholars?’ Also in October 2001 he said ‘a million innocent children have been killed in Iraq…but we do not hear anyone condemning this, nor do we hear any judicial decree from the official scholars.’ He complains that ‘fools cry about the deaths of Americans [but] they don’t cry about the deaths of our sons’. Muslims around the world are suffering, he says, but ‘we do not hear their voices’. 9/11 was an attempt to give voice – to use a suitably therapeutic phrase – to these voiceless victims. As bin Laden said, in the past ‘the victim wasn’t even allowed to complain’, and 9/11 was an attempt to ‘rebalance that’.

9/11 itself is the legacy, the logical outcome, of today’s victim-oriented politics. In a world where different groups compete to have their victim status accorded due respect and honour, even acts of barbarous terrorism are, in essence, big, loud, bloody demands for recognition.

Brendan O’Neill is deputy editor of spiked .

After 9/11: scapegoating liberty, by Nadine Strossen

The countless times I have been asked to discuss ‘balancing liberty and security post-911’ underscores a predominant assumption, which Tony Blair and Charles Clarke in the UK recently stressed explicitly: that civil liberties were a luxury that belonged to an irretrievably bygone era, and which henceforth all rational people will gladly forsake in order to preserve the lives of ourselves and our loved ones, as well as our Western democratic societies.

In the US, the Bush administration has asserted that it may unilaterally do anything in the name of counterterrorism – ranging from secretly arresting and incarcerating suspects incommunicado, to torturing them and trying them before kangaroo courts – with too little resistance from politicians of either major party, the press, or the public. I constantly think of how prescient George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was, with its perpetual state of war against randomly shifting international enemies; the identity of the ostensible enemy did not matter, since it was just a smokescreen to scapegoat citizens’ freedom.

I am not suggesting that we don’t now face all-too-real terrorist threats. Rather, believing that liberty and security are, on the whole, mutually reinforcing rather than antagonistic concerns, I am convinced that scapegoating civil liberties as a purported solution to the real dangers we face will only make us less free, not more safe.

Nadine Strossen is president of the American Civil Liberties Union .

Al-Qaeda: spoilt little rich kids, by Michael Fitzpatrick

If the 9/11 suicide hijackers had issued a statement to the world, which they pointedly did not bother to do, the familiar cry of the childhood tantrum – ‘Now look what you made me do’ – would surely best express their outlook. This act of apocalyptic barbarism was more a result of the infantilising impact of the culture of resentment and victimhood than a particular response to US foreign policy, more a gesture of impotent rage than an act of political strategy.

Five years later, 9/11 has provoked attempts at imitation, but has had little wider consequences. (Western military incursions overseas followed an independent dynamic: chaos and terror in Afghanistan and Iraq and Lebanon long predated the attacks on the Twin Towers.) Despite numerous gloomy prognostications, what is striking is how little has changed. The events of that grim day revealed a state of moral confusion in contemporary society and the extreme alienation of some young people. But 9/11 was a grim manifestation of a nihilistic outlook – it did not create this outlook and in some ways merely exposed its vacuousness.

Michael Fitzpatrick is an author and doctor in London.

A history of the future, by Faisal Devji

Looking back on 9/11 has itself become a sign of our failure to comprehend the event. For like every other debate, discussion and dissertation upon al-Qaeda, to look back on its greatest attack is to know the movement by forensics alone. And however important this knowledge might be in predicting and preventing future attacks, it is unable to grasp the movement’s historical meaning. Such knowledge therefore remains the preserve of journalists and policemen, who continue to be our chief sources for material on al-Qaeda.

Scholars of Islam and specialists on the Muslim world, who had for the most part failed to notice the movement’s emergence before 9/11, have themselves adopted the manner of newsmen and detectives to study it. Those who do not do so insist against all evidence on linking al-Qaeda to the older models of militancy with which they are familiar – thus the attention paid to the movement’s ancestry, which supposedly includes fundamentalist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and fundamentalist thinkers like Sayyid Qutb.

Of course al-Qaeda is a product of history, but one that includes secular nationalism and atheistic communism as much as it does fundamentalism. Indeed, these political forms share much more with each other than any of them do with al-Qaeda, including a focus on the parties and ideologies as well as the elections and revolutions that characterise all modern states. None of this is true of al-Qaeda, which is a franchise rather than a party, a network rather than a hierarchy. Instead its peers are the global movements dedicated to ecology or peace whose membership is made up of disparate individuals, not classes or masses.

The almost obsessive way in which many experts on religion or terrorism connect al-Qaeda to the past, not only to the history of Muslim militancy, but also to that of anarchism or fascism, serves to conceal the fact that it actually comes to us from the future. But 9/11 is an anticipation of the future not in its violence so much as its organisation, which dispenses with the terms and categories proper to a politics dominated by states. Like its more pacific peers, al-Qaeda is neither a political nor a military movement but a civil and civilian one, whose arena, however, is not bounded by any state but comprises the entire globe.

Is it too much to say that 9/11 represents in some perverse way the emergence of a global civil society within a world still dominated by nation states? If this is indeed the case, then the violence of a movement like al-Qaeda can be attributed, at least in part, to the fact that it exists in a new global space possessing as yet no institutional or political forms of its own. Islam is therefore one name by which a still invisible global civil society can be known. It is this name, and not any shared history or religious tradition that links an Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to a Mohammad Sidique Khan in Britain.

Faisal Devji is a professor of history at the New School University in New York, and author of Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity.

9/11: a mirror on our societies, by Jeffrey Rosen

In the face of historic traumas, nations aren’t changed beyond recognition; instead, they become more like themselves. The balance between liberty and security, for example, was not changed beyond recognition in Britain and America after 9/11; both countries reacted in ways that illuminated the distinctive strengths and weaknesses of their very different political cultures.

In America, the president aggressively insisted that he had the unilateral authority to spy on American citizens and to torture and detain suspected terrorists; but the Supreme Court and Congress unequivocally rejected this constitutionally dubious vision of unchecked executive authority. Thanks to the strong libertarian strain that has defined American history from the beginning, checks and balances were more or less maintained.

In Britain, which lacks a tradition of separated powers, the prime minister was more successful in cutting back on Habeas corpus and in asserting broad powers of detention and surveillance; but the political reaction to the unsuccessful war in Iraq eventually mobilised the public to resurrect the traditional British emphasis on due process and fair play. In short term, all of the Western democracies reacted to fears of terrorism by catering to the public’s unrealistic demands for complete protection against threats that can neither be precisely measured nor prevented.

After five years, however, despite subsequent attacks, the citizens of each Western democracy calmed down a bit and reverted to historic patterns. The fact that civil liberties were challenged but not eradicated five years after the 9/11 attacks reminds us of the erratic, anxious, initially overwrought, but ultimately more reasonable values of the Western democracies themselves.

Jeffrey Rosen is professor of law at George Washington University Law School, and author of The Unwanted Gaze, The Naked Crowd, and The Most Democratic Branch.

The new twin towers: Terror and Security, by Michael Bentley

The anxiety about it is Anxiety itself. We have manipulated ourselves into a form of structured Angst over the past five years, one that has taken the world of lower case and transformed it into its own twin towers: Terror and Security. That 9/11 instilled terror, and that action against terror involves security, no one denies. Individuals from all states know that risks are out there and acknowledge the sense of taking precautions against them. But we are never told the insurance risk, as we might be with fire or flood. We never learn what our chances are, as we do with the Lottery. Capitalisation of risk seemingly removes any need to ask quantitative questions. Your train will explode, your plane will fall from the sky; so when government constricts liberty and renders its chickens brainless when they are not actually headless, the licence comes from Terror and Security. It has to be done to protect you.

Perhaps Tony Blair is right in saying that history has nothing to say about all this. It certainly does nothing for his case. One might reasonably have expected, in the light of experience, that a catastrophe such as 9/11 would create a fever of fear for a month, a season, a year, and that thereafter a cooler sense of proportion and evaluation would ensue. That has not happened. Instead the promotion of Terror and Security to knock down arguments that prevail over all intelligent query has produced the world in which a book, a tube of sun-cream or a musical instrument have become part of the global Risk. Espousing Terror and Security confirms the contours of a culture that would rather be anything but dead, an assumption that should give us pause.

Michael Bentley is professor of modern history at the University of St Andrews and will be speaking at the Battle of Ideas in October.

The coming global showdown, by Norman Levitt

My guess is that 9/11 will be remembered as the event which began to make it clear to the West that the world is once again more pathologically bipolar, and that a long, nasty struggle is in store between the industrial world, with its liberal social and political values, and an increasingly unified, desperate and ferocious Islam. Perhaps this is a false alarm and the present antagonisms will simmer down to the point where there are only fitful local confrontations. But I think things are, sadly, headed in the other direction.

We are now at the stage where politicians, along with well-meaning intellectuals, especially in Europe, are hard at work constructing rationalisations for denying the bitter reality while they try to buy off Muslim fury with placating gestures of all sorts. I don’t think that this will last. Rather, over time, a hardline approach to the problem will become more and more the norm. The specific consequences of a global showdown are hard to predict, but I greatly doubt that they will be pleasant or humane.

Norman Levitt is professor of mathematics at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

A war within the West, by Daniel Ben-Ami

What strikes me as most odd about the response to the 9/11 attacks was their representation as a specifically Islamic fundamentalist reaction to modernity. They were seen as mainly rooted in the caves of Afghanistan, the madrassas (Islamic schools) of Pakistan, and the desert sheikdom of Saudi Arabia. Hardly anyone seemed to notice that hostility to modernity has become mainstream in Western culture.

The enormous gains of civilisation are constantly being called into question. What were once, rightly, seen as huge benefits to humanity are now viewed with anxiety. The water that we drink and use to clean ourselves is seen as a scarce resource. Cheap food – which has liberated us from the curse of constantly living on the edge of starvation – is blamed for causing obesity. Long-distance travel is stigmatised. Cars are blamed for causing pollution and contributing to global warming. Aircraft are also accused of damaging the environment and the passengers they carry are criticised for undermining local cultures.

Attacks on modernity have their origins in the West rather than the Middle East. If a war is to be fought it should be against the ideology of anti-modernism emanating from Western societies.

Daniel Ben-Ami is a writer on economics and author of Cowardly Capitalism: The Myth of the Global Financial Casino . He is speaking at the Battle of Ideas in October.

The suicide of the West, by Richard Koch

9/11 revealed to a startled America that it had enemies who could inflict damage on US territory, something the communists never did. It led to a temporary spike in American nationalism, to the well-conceived assault on the Taliban in Afghanistan, and to the colossal blunder of the second Iraq war, which has fuelled Islamic terrorism more than any other imaginable route.

Yet in history’s long haul, 9/11 will go down as a diversion of spectacular barbarism but little import. To be sure, it reveals a new ideological enemy of the West, a tiny but relentless group who hate the West. But what may overturn the West’s liberal civilisation is not the very few who hate it, but the vast majority of Westerners who are indifferent to their heritage. Americans and Europeans created a fantastic civilisation on the back of optimism, science, individualism, liberalism, economic growth, and Christian compassion. We are losing faith in these touchstones, even in true personal liberty and social equality. Without belief in ourselves and our civilisation, we have no need of external enemies to seal our fate.

Richard Koch is co-author of Suicide of the West and is speaking at the Battle of Ideas in October.

9/11’s legacy is the Bush administration’s authoritarianism, by Wendy Kaminer

If George W Bush can thank 9/11 for the support he came to enjoy in his first term, and for his re-election in 2004, then 9/11’s lasting impacts will comprise all the lasting impacts of the Bush administration (which seem unlikely to include the spread of pluralistic democracies in the Middle East).

I don’t know how to rank the damage this administration has wrought upon civil liberties, the environment, the economy, scientific research, efforts to contain violent fundamentalism, Iraq, or the image and influence of the US abroad. For now, I’ll simply cite one dangerous, post-9/11 political development in the US – the rise of authoritarianism, in the form of unaccountable executive power. The Supreme Court has checked perhaps the most grievous abuse of the imperial president – the unilateral assumption of power to deny all due process and fair trial rights to people interned at Guantanamo Bay. It may eventually review the administration’s warrantless domestic spying programme, which one lower federal court judge has denounced in a very controversial opinion.

But the ideological balance of the Supreme Court is as tenuous as the health of its ageing justices, and the federal judiciary in general is not a dependable defender of individual rights, which, since 9/11, have not fared nearly as well as reality TV. If politics has been changed dramatically by 9/11, popular culture seems the same, only more so.

Wendy Kaminer is a law professor and author of Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety and several other books. She is speaking at the Battle of Ideas in October.

Islamofascists vs the Enlightenment, by Michael Baum

Recently my wife and I, together with other members of our families, attended the ‘Last night at the Proms’ at the Kenwood open-air concert in Hampstead Heath, London. It is a delightful annual event that marks the end of the summer season, with orchestral pieces including Thomas Arne’s ‘Rule Britannia’ and Edward Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance March No1’. It is always accompanied by much waving of the Union flags by the audience and a spectacular firework display. Sitting among the wreckage of their picnics, people of all ages, social classes and ethnic groups joined in. This display of jingoism was an act in self-deprecating irony, which the British do so well. No one really believes that Britain rules the waves anymore, but we are now much better at waiving the rules.

As I looked around I thought to myself: if this is decadence then I’m all for it. I love my country and thank it for the way it treated my grandparents 100 years ago after their escape from the pogroms in Russia. As a Boeing 747 flew peacefully overhead in a clear starlit sky, I was cruelly reminded of the events of 9/11 five years ago. To me this was a declaration of a global war against liberal democracies throughout the world. I am reminded of the contribution the USA made in sacrificing tens of thousands of young men so that Europe would remain free of Nazism. If that had failed, my family would have become toast. I’m reminded how the USA faced down communism and freed Eastern Europe from its grip. Now we face a new evil ideology: Islamic fundamentalism. The destruction of the twin towers should have been the clarion call to all the free world that another threat to our freedom has emerged; and yet, the UN wrings its hands and somehow the West, the victim, becomes the subject for vilification by an unholy alliance of the extreme left and Islamofascism.

It is my belief that our future lies in the hands of the Western liberal democracies that must have the courage to believe in their values, not with the UN whose membership includes nations ruled by despots or kleptocrats, each enjoying equal voting rights. My evening at Kenwood was a tiny vignette of what we are defending, with the genius of the composers emerging out of the age of Enlightenment describing our transition from subjugated serfs to free spirits.

Michael Baum is emeritus professor of surgery and visiting professor of medical humanities at University College London.

A legacy of distrust, by Ceri Dingle

Rather than bringing awesome changes, 9/11 revealed and accelerated unhealthy trends that already existed within Western societies. Disillusionment with modernity and fear of ourselves, others and with what might be are not new; but they are now rampant. Indeed, everything, not just mislaid luggage, now seems to a have a ‘distrust’ label attached. Wondering ‘What if?’ is no longer the preserve of the paranoid but apparently a commonsense way to approach life.

For the developing world, WORLDwrite’s key area of work, this is the post-9/11 nightmare. Distrust is the order of the day: ‘good governance’ and ‘security’ are the buzzwords. From anti-democratic and intrusive surveillance schemes attached to debt relief to opposition to foreign direct investment moving into the poorest countries, no one, it seems, can be trusted – not donors, investors or third world governments and their often poverty-stricken populations. This leaves the developing world stuck, without the resources it needs or the freedom to do what it wants. Our peers in the developing world now have to suffer new levels of odious meddling by NGOs, UN bureaucrats and peacekeepers who, post-9/11, have developed new justifications for their missionary positions.

This possibly sounds bleak, but in truth it might take very little to change things for the better. For a start we could celebrate what we have, trust our fellow man and recognise that we can do good and great things. That would be the perfect snub to the 9/11 terrorists, those educated young nihilists, and also to today’s contemporary panic merchants and purveyors of doom.

Ceri Dingle is director of the youth education charity WORLDwrite (Charity No. 1060869, UN DPI-accredited NGO and DfES-registered NVYO).

Postponing social progress, by Bill Durodie

The response to 9/11 confirmed that the dangerous and illogical ‘act now, find the evidence later’ imperative of precautionary thinking has become the guiding framework of our times. This has allowed governments to avoid the difficult goal of identifying a positive purpose for society by promoting the more immediate task of safeguarding vulnerable people.

Social disengagement and cynicism enabled those who claimed to be acting on behalf of the public not to be held accountable for their related actions and opinions. But absence of direction, an exaggerated perception of threat and identification as victims are the drivers of contemporary misanthropy and its associated forms of terror. The refusal to identify our pessimistic culture as the root of terrorism and other ills, together with the assumed need to be seen to be doing something, has postponed social progress.

Bill Durodie is senior lecturer in risk and security at the Resilience Centre at Cranfield University, England. He is speaking at the Battle of Ideas in October.

A new religious war, by Phillip Blond

I had always thought that the next world war would be a religious conflict. For me 9/11 announced that this incipient religious war had indeed gone global. We now have a war of belief against unbelief and it is not clear that this will be confined to the current conflict between Islam and the West. Secularisation is almost always celebrated by liberals, as if religion were such a curse that the unenlightened have to be liberated – by force if necessary – from its clutches. But religion represents the values and beliefs of the overwhelming majority of the world population. The resultant war on world religion conducted by the West through capitalism, sex and glamour was therefore not likely to be unopposed.

In a direct conflict between the free market and faith it was not clear that religion would lose – in many parts of the world it did not. The vital ingredient for the subsequent success of Western globalising capital was provided by the European Enlightenment and the perverse humanism that it gave birth to. By insisting that all humans and all cultures had to be remodelled according to the new Western construct of acquisitive individuals who constructed their own truths, modern liberalism aborted the constraints of communal religion and gave fresh impetus and moral legitimation to imperialism and Empire.

That this legacy has come back to haunt us is not commonly recognised. Once the collective faiths and the communal codes that the Islamic faithful lived by were brutally suppressed by secular Western elites, religion was privatised and denied public expression. Confined to the ghetto, the Islamists, appalled at the world that was forced upon them, copied the structures of Western humanism. They produced their own self-made religious absolute whose universal applicability was also insisted upon. Thus is al-Qaeda the bastard offspring of a perverted Islam and a nihilistic West.

So the new world war has already begun. It is religious and it will spread. At first it will be local, asymmetrical and conducted via the means and methodology of terror – but soon this ideology will capture nation states (as it has already in the US and Iran) and then who knows where it will end or what its consequence might be? 9/11 thus represents an intensification and globalisation of a process that was already underway.

Philip Blond is lecturer in theology and philosophy at St Martin’s College in Lancaster, and author of Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology. He is speaking at the Battle of Ideas in October.


4. The real conspiracy behind 9/11
Review of THE LOOMING TOWER: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
by Lawrence Wright
Martin Amis examines the horrific coincidences that enabled Osama bin Laden’s progress from down-and-out cave dweller to the chief symbol of Islamist terrorism

READERS SHOULD prepare themselves for a festival of gullibility. Asked in a recent survey to explain their presence in Iraq, 85 per cent of American soldiers said that the “main mission” was “to retaliate for Saddam’s role” in the September 11 attacks.

About two thirds of American civilians, it’s true, share that misapprehension; but it is implausible that frontline troops are so incuriously risking their lives.

This near-consensus on the question cannot be due to ignorance. It comes from the same wishfulness that fortifies the majority belief among Muslims that September 11 was the work of Mossad.

Although few Americans think that the Israelis did it, nearly half (42 per cent) think that the Americans did. This means that the average American is more distrustful of Washington than the average Pakistani (in Pakistan a mere 41 per cent consider that the attacks were not carried out by Arab terrorists — as against 59 per cent of Turks and Egyptians and 65 per cent of Indonesians).

American sceptics hold that the collapse of the twin towers was caused by expert demolition. They hold that the explosion at the Pentagon was consistent, not with a crashed 757 but with a cruise missile. In other words, Washington wounded itself.

Psychiatrists call it fabulation. The rest of us call it conspiracy theory — or the masochistic lust for chicanery and compound deceit. Fabulation may more simply be the failure to assimilate; and we concede that September 11 will perhaps never be wholly assimilable. The first question to be asked of the fabulist is cui bono ? And the answer would be, “Well, the Administration, which could then accrue the power . . . to march on Baghdad”. We are arriving at an axiom in long-term thinking about international terrorism: the real danger lies not in what it inflicts but in what it provokes. Thus by far the gravest consequence of September 11 to date is Iraq.

The American death toll in the war will soon exceed the death toll in the original attack; and for the Iraqi people that figure is exceeded every three weeks.

Nor are the losses merely actuarial: they are also to be seen in our weakened hold on the high ground of morality and reason. It is as if September 11 entrained a net increase in suggestibility, and at every level. At the top, a President guided a) by blithe adventurists and b) by intimations from the Almighty. At the bottom, a citizenry haunted by rudderless suspicions. The fact is that America didn’t wound itself in September 2001, as the fabulists claim. It did that in March 2003 and thereafter.

The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright’s tough-minded and cussedly persistent narrative opens with portraits of the triumvirate of developed Islamism: Sayyid Qutb, Ayman al- Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden. Almost at once, the question arises: should we be solaced or additionally galled by the poverty of the human material now so ferociously ranged against us? In these pages we meet some formidable schemers and killers, such as Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the author of “the planes operation” (since captured). As for the other players, there are nuances, there are shades of black; but the consistent profile is marked by intellectual vacuity, by a fanaticism that simply thirsts for the longest possible penal code, and, most basically, by a chaotically adolescent — or even juvenile — indifference to reality. These men are fabulists crazed with blood and death; reality for them is just something you have to manoeuvre around in order to destroy it.

Qutb (1906-66), an Egyptian writer and civil servant, does duty as the first framer of Islamism. And you wonder about the condition of the Muslim imagination, in that it was so easily “captured” by this almost endearingly comical figure: an entanglement of drives and urges, draped in piety and hauteur. His fate at the hands of Nasser was not at all comical; and Qutb’s martyrdom was his controlled historical timebomb.

At any rate, Islamism owes to him the twin dreams of planetary domination and theocratic genocide. Zawahiri, Qutb’s compatriot, gives further weight to the argument that international terrorism was born and raised in the prisons of Egypt.

A brutalised medic, Zawahiri was the leader and chief moralist of his own group, al-Jihad, where he deployed the doctrine or heresy (or tinkertoy sophistry) of takfir . As Wright explains: “The takfiris convinced themselves that salvation for all of humanity lay on the other side of moral territory that had always been the certain province of the damned. They would shoulder the risks to their eternal souls by assuming the divine authority of deciding who was a real Muslim and who was not, who should live and who should die.”

This greatly expanded the population of the killable. Indeed, no armed doctrine in history has availed itself of a vaster target — anything and anyone. “Unfortunately,” one of bin Laden's companions said, “his IQ was not that great.”

The verdict stands. Bin Laden’s contribution is his image, and nothing more: omnicidal nullity under a smiling halo of beatitude. His personal deformation remains mysterious. Zawahiri was jailed and tortured. Qutb was jailed, tortured and executed. Nobody traumatised bin Laden; unlike his mentors, he was not internally rewired by whips and electric cables. Alone among a shifting crew of one-eyed mullahs, tin-legged zealots, blind shiekhs and paralysed clerics, bin Laden was always intact.

Physically, that is. At the time of his Declaration of War against America (1996), bin Laden was mouldering in a cave in Tora Bora — stateless, penniless, and half-starved. His achievements were a matter of myth, of fabulation; he was a funk-ridden and incompetent ex-jihadi (a mere pepperer of the Red Army); and he was a serial business flop.

In short, he was a terrorist financier who had run out of cash, and was now entirely at the mercy of the local Islamist power, the village-idiot vigilantes known as the Taleban.

Very soon, Zawahiri would be in a Russian jail, and bin Laden subsisting on stale bread and contaminated water. At this stage al-Qaeda’s survival looked unlikely and its chances of mounting an operation the size of September 11 were infinitesimal. The “declaration” was little more than a deathbed whimper.

How then did the cornered troglodyte of 1996 become the radiant Mahdi of 2001? Bin Laden’s notoriety was lucrative; in 1998 the Taleban leader Mullah Omar started taking bribes from Riyadh as a down payment for his extradition and delivery to the Americans. But Omar and Osama were soulmates — and business partners. That same summer, the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania took place. In Nairobi, al-Qaeda killed 206 Africans and wounded 4,500 (150 were blinded by flying glass), plus a total of 12 Americans; the half-bungled attack in Dar es Salaam killed no Americans at all. Although Islamic reaction worldwide was unanimous disgust, it was, definingly, the American reaction that empowered bin Laden.

Of the 66 US cruise missiles fired at camps around Khost in Afghanistan, a number failed to detonate. According to Wright (his source is Russian Intelligence), “bin Laden sold the unexploded missiles to China for $10 million”.

In al-Qaeda's next attack, on the USS Cole in 2000, the symbolism was far more finely tuned: a futuristic fighting ship crippled by a dinghy. Established as the global champion of the anti-American cause, bin Laden was now the recipient of fresh recruits bearing Samsonite suitcases stuffed with petrodollars from awed admirers in the Gulf.

September 11 itself emerges as a chapter of hideous coincidences. In its early days the “planes operation” consisted of two monoglot “muscle” Saudis blundering around Los Angeles — incapable, it seemed, of asking the way to the nearest flight school.

All was set fair for yet another of al Qaeda’s ridiculous failures, on a par with the plan to assassinate the Pope in 1994 (abandoned soon after the purchase of the killers’ cassocks). The spectacular attack, “the big one”, was a non-starter until the fortuitous arrival in Kandahar of the “Hamburg contingent” (Atta et al): these men were superficially Westernised, and superficially rational: possessed by just the right kind of functioning insanity.

Negative coincidences also characterised the American end of the story. It is painful to follow the inter-agency malfunctions, resentments and pedantries that opened the door to disaster. The man who came closest to averting it, John O’Neill, quit the FBI in August 2001. He took up his new job on the 23rd: head of security at the World Trade Centre. He had 19 days to live.

Expert opinion in the West is now largely persuaded that al-Qaeda is more or less finished. The “base” — justly so called in the adjectival sense — has become, we hear, “a state of mind”. And what is that state of mind? One convinced that it is possible simultaneously to be a random mass murderer and a good Muslim.

A death-brimmed bog of paranoia and credulity, it is the state of mind of the armed fabulist. The conspiracy detected here is the infidel campaign to obliterate the faith. It all began with the retreat of the Turkish armies from Vienna and the confirmation of Islamic decline: the year was 1683 and the day was September 11.


5. The World After 9/11
Amy Davidson talks to Seymour M. Hersh, Jon Lee Anderson, and George Packer about Iraq, Afghanistan, the war on terror, and whether America is stronger now.

AMY DAVIDSON: Sy, in your first article after 9/11—just a few weeks after—you quoted a senior C.I.A. official who, you wrote, “confirmed that the intelligence community had not yet developed a significant amount of solid information about the terrorists’ organization, financing, and planning.” He said, “One day, we’ll know, but at the moment we don’t know.” Has that day arrived?

SEYMOUR M. HERSH: No, not in my view. He also said at the time that there was a debate about whether the attacks were a long-planned, deep-cell operation, and we were going to be looking at cell operations like this throughout the country—major embedded groups of Al Qaeda, what you will. The other possibility was that the nineteen hijackers were the equivalent of a pickup basketball team that made it to the Final Four. His guess was the latter. I think that’s true. I think the nineteen guys, however skilled, were more lucky than anything else, because of our lack of preparation. But we really know very little about how that operation worked, even now.

DAVIDSON: Why is that?

HERSH: Because the nineteen guys are dead. Despite all the arrests we’ve made—of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others—I’m very skeptical of the information we’ve got from interrogations, basically because, once people get into the interrogation process, even today, the torture is such that they invent stories to make us happy. So we’ve got an awful lot of bad information, along with some good. But certainly a lot of bad stuff. So we don’t have a good picture of what happened.

DAVIDSON: Let me ask all three of you: how good was Al Qaeda five years ago? Were the hijackers a pickup basketball team? And how good is Al Qaeda now—has it got better since 9/11, or is it much weaker?

GEORGE PACKER: I think that it’s been franchised since 9/11, and now we’ve got small groups in many parts of the world claiming varying degrees of association with Al Qaeda but, essentially, acting operationally on their own—pursuing their own regional and local goals but aligning themselves with the more global ambitions of Al Qaeda. If you consider Al Qaeda just in terms of its main base of operations, which were formerly in Afghanistan, that Al Qaeda, as far as I know, is not achieving very much in the way of operations. But what it’s become is an enormous public-relations boon to any group that wants to wear its colors and go off into its own Final Four tournament, and act essentially on its own. What our colleague Lawrence Wright’s book “The Looming Tower” suggests is that Al Qaeda is mainly the unbelievably ambitious and persistent vision of one man, and he has outlasted all kinds of other people in his willingness to stick with it, certainly through the nineties.

DAVIDSON: Osama bin Laden.

PACKER: Yes.

JON LEE ANDERSON: I agree with what George says and what Sy says. I think that Al Qaeda achieved in the attacks of 9/11 a blow so dramatic that it seemed to the Islamists to strip away the defenses and the perceived invincibility of the world’s greatest superpower, and it became possible, in a psychological and even tactical way, for others to try to emulate it. So whether or not Al Qaeda is operationally as potent as it was around 9/11 doesn’t matter. The mere fact that the United States absorbed that blow, unaware, sent a huge message around the world, and not only to non-state actors, like jihadis who follow Osama bin Laden or Zarqawi or others, but also to regimes that were held in check, prior to 9/11, by the sense of our overwhelming military capabilities. They no longer feel so threatened. And I think the Iraq war has done a lot to enhance that view—in other words, our inability to make headway against insurgents in a place like Iraq has stripped away the aura of American invincibility and might.

DAVIDSON: Let’s talk about Iraq, and let’s start with the question of whether we should be talking about Iraq when we’re looking back at the legacy of 9/11. What does Iraq have to do with 9/11?

PACKER: Iraq has turned out to be an enormous wrong turn in the five years since 9/11. The war was justified by the Administration, at some moments directly, by connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda, which were grossly overstated if not absolutely false, and at times indirectly, by a suggestion that if we eliminated this gross dictatorship in the middle of the Arab world we would begin to drain the swamps that were breeding terrorists. That was a more abstract, theoretical strategy that became the justification when the weapons of mass destruction didn’t show up. So now, even as we speak, the President, the Vice-President, and the Secretary of Defense are all trying to rally the country back to the war in Iraq by associating it with Islamic extremism. At this point, I think that argument has largely run out of juice, because there have been too many deceptions and too many rosy scenarios that failed to materialize in Iraq, and because the connection is simply too tenuous or too cosmic for Americans to accept it. The Administration cried wolf, and I don’t think this time around the electorate is going to buy that success in the war on terror and success in Iraq are one and the same thing.

DAVIDSON: Jon Lee, can you talk about that? You’ve spent a lot of time in Iraq.

ANDERSON: I agree with George’s appraisal of how the war came about, and the deceit that was involved, and the notion that, of course, Iraq and Saddam had nothing, or very little, to do with Al Qaeda—certainly there’s no evidence that Saddam had anything at all to do with 9/11. But build it and they will come. Iraq has become a central theatre in the war on terror because the Administration continues to say it is. And, therefore, having staked America’s reputation, prestige, military prowess, and all of that on the war in Iraq, the Administration—certainly this Administration, and, I suspect, future Administrations—will find it extremely difficult to extricate itself gracefully from Iraq without some electorally acceptable semblance of victory or, at least, a job accomplished. And therein lies the great disaster that is Iraq, because it didn’t have to be a disaster, but it has become so. You now have General George Casey, the top commander in Iraq, saying that American forces hope to be able to withdraw to superbases within a year to eighteen months. Read the subtext here: the country is, by any measure, in a state of civil war, and the conclusion is that the Administration intends to let the civil war fight itself out, probably by ultimately choosing a side and then withdrawing to these bases. By then, there will be a new spin operation, which is already in motion, to explain away the fact that America’s arrival in Iraq opened this Pandora’s box. The onus will be left on the Iraqis. It’s a very messy scenario, but I do think that even if it wasn’t initially part of the larger war on terror it is so now, and will remain so for some time in the future.

DAVIDSON: Sy, what do you think about that?

HERSH: In the fall of 2001, I was learning a lot about a great debate inside the Administration about what to do in Afghanistan. There were a lot of people who argued very bitterly against the air war—I’m talking about people on the inside, tough guys—arguing against what we all assumed to be the one just aspect of this whole post-9/11 process, which was the invasion and bombing of Afghanistan and the Special Forces operation. That was the beginning of the whole torture issue with Guantánamo, and the buying of prisoners. All of that stuff was debated before late October, when the President authorized the bombing. There was a huge debate about even whom to support in Afghanistan—whether or not we should do more real counterinsurgency, and take up the Taliban and consider them more seriously as people you could actually talk to, and the decision was that we ought to go with the warlords. Like a lot of people, I accepted the premise of the Afghan war; I accepted the premise that it wasn’t that irrational, that we had to do something. I didn’t accept it the second time, in Iraq. If the Administration wants a role model for how to respond to grave abuses in terms of international terrorism, look at the Indian government and Mumbai, the train bombing there. The government treated it like a criminal activity. By going to war, instead of criminalizing what Osama bin Laden and his minions did—there’s no question that, in terms of military operations, this is the worst government in the history of America.

DAVIDSON: George, this is something you’ve written about. Do you think that we’ve learned something since 9/11 about the limits of what military action can accomplish?

PACKER: Some of us have, including some people in the government and in the military, but they’re not in the key positions. Sy’s most recent article, on the Lebanon war, suggests that the people who are in the key positions continue to learn the wrong lessons, which is that air power can destroy deeply entrenched groups that are as much political as they are military. Which is very worrying, because it shows that what one hears—that no unwelcome information reaches the President, that it is generally stopped at his door by people from the Vice-President’s office or by his immediate staff—is true. It’s something I hear over and over again. So I don’t think anyone in a position to make decisions has learned. I think what those people have done is protected themselves from learning by counterpunching every time anyone lands a blow and turning what should be very difficult strategic policy questions into, essentially, part of a permanent campaign at home to win a political argument. I think they’ve taken that more seriously, they’ve given it more energy, and they consider it more important, in a way, than they do the actual conflict outside of our borders. But I also want to say, there’s a huge ideological battle that is not of our making, but which is now the world we live in. That’s where I think the real key questions are. I think Sy’s absolutely right that war is far too blunt an instrument, that crime and intelligence work are where we—and the Brits, and other countries—have had our few successes. But, beyond that, there is this ideological problem, which anyone who travels in that part of the world gets a heavy dose of. And we don’t know what to do about it. And that is a failure of leadership.

ANDERSON: I’d like to leap in here and add something that has become dear to my heart in the course of observing on the ground the conflicts engendered since 9/11: first Afghanistan, then Iraq, and, most recently, Lebanon. I’ll begin with an anecdote. Immediately following the ceasefire, after four weeks of bombing, Hezbollah announced that it would pay for the reconstruction of homes for the tens of thousands of people whose homes had been destroyed in the Israeli bombardment—for the homes, a year’s worth of rent, and new furniture—and would itself rebuild, with funds from Iran, no doubt. Hezbollah effectively captured people’s loyalties and took away that role of the state from the Lebanese government, and, for that matter, from the larger actors in the conflict—including America. This was just the latest example; it goes back to Iraq and it goes back to Afghanistan. Following the American police action in Afghanistan, to chase the Taliban into the hills, almost nothing was done to rebuild the country. It took—I forget, exactly—a year and a half or two years before the first efforts were made to pave the Kabul-Kandahar road, which was passable for about a year but no longer is today, because the Taliban have returned and are likely to attack if you are a Westerner. Very little was done in the political arena. This problem of Islamic extremism, which George was referring to and which is very real, is a problem of perception. America is seen to act with all of its might and resources when it comes to military adventurism or military involvement. In Iraq, the amount of money expended there on nothing very visible, for the sake of pursuing the war, is astronomical. But what have we done to rebuild? I believe this sort of military action has to go hand in hand with a radical political decision to actually reform these countries. For Afghanistan, that could have meant a kind of mini-Marshall plan, which could have shown both the Afghans and the Muslim world that we had no vested interest in controlling that country but bore some responsibility for what had happened there. It would have been a very cost-effective investment. Once again, we do not truly compete for hearts and minds, because we’re not willing to pony up to invest, to show that America isn’t only about war, or being crusading Christians, or whatever it is.

DAVIDSON: One thing that we have built since 9/11 is a detention center at Guantánamo, which is as much a legacy of 9/11 as Iraq, and is the sort of blunt instrument that you mentioned, George. What has America gained from Guantánamo, and what has it lost?

HERSH: The evidence is, we’ve gained much less than people think we have, or at least than the Administration tells us, in terms of actionable intelligence. George made a point about how we have to change and deal seriously with people who want to fly airplanes into our buildings, and we really have to improve our ability to learn who they are and how to track them. I do think there’s been maybe the beginning of some idea that simple force doesn’t work. We’ll see. There is some new thinking going on. Even in Iraq, some of the military units seem to be operating more sensibly in terms of dealing with the population, but it’s far too late. The whole world was on our side after 9/11—most of the Muslim world, too, was shocked by the crazy activity—and, essentially, we’ve lost the moral authority, the moral edge we had. It’s the same thing Jon Lee was saying about the inability to really do reconstruction, in as serious a way as we do deconstruction. I grew up thinking that in America we always wore the white hat. It’s no longer so. Although I will still say that the average Muslim, if he got into business and made a pretty good living and got to the middle class, his ambition would be to send his kid to Yale. That still exists. But we’re not capitalizing on it.

DAVIDSON: George, you wrote a little about that this week—the question of moderate Islam.

PACKER: One thing we lose sight of, because we’re focussed, rightly, on the use of American power, is the battle within Muslim countries, which is acute and getting hotter all the time. It’s been going on for half a century now. What we’re experiencing is the sharp end of a battle that has been rising within Muslim countries since independence, and that’s a battle over modernity and what kind of society Muslims want to live in. For the article in this week’s issue, I went looking for some sign of intellectual moderation in places like Sudan and Morocco. I can’t say I was enormously encouraged, but there are things that are going on that we miss with the headlines coming from the Middle East. A Sudanese scholar told me, “I expect nothing good from the Arab world”—by which I think he meant the Middle East—“for a long time.” The place where there’s hope is the periphery, the Muslim periphery, from Senegal to Indonesia, countries that aren’t often in the headlines but where this internal battle to define their own societies is less explosive—and is less caught up with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Iraq war, American military power, and so on. It is being waged in the way it can be when people aren’t being held at gunpoint, which is through ideas, through political parties, and even through democratic politics in some of these countries. So it isn’t entirely about war and destruction; it’s also about ideas and about the direction these societies are going in. What I heard over and over, though, is that the pictures on Al Jazeera coming from the Middle East make it very difficult for reformers in these peripheral Muslim countries to gain an audience, because they’re increasingly seen as being apologists for the West. The more this is defined as Islam versus the West, the worse it is for us and, I would argue, for Muslims themselves. The more it can become a battle of ideas within Muslim countries over modernity rather than the West, then the more hope there is, because I think most people don’t want to live in a totalitarian society in which seventh-century customs are imposed on them by force. I think most people want to live normal, modern lives.

DAVIDSON: I want to go back five years, to the moment right after 9/11 when we talked a lot about justice, about bringing the perpetrators to justice, and to the question of whether there has been justice for 9/11. Sy, you mentioned Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is described as the mastermind behind 9/11. He’s actually in U.S. custody. Why hasn’t he been brought to trial?

HERSH: Because the Administration has chosen not to do so. I think that one of the reasons is that at trial he would talk about how he was treated. If somebody would come into a courtroom describing the kind of treatment he’s reportedly had at the hands of the United States, a conviction might be very hard to get. We simply decided very early on that it was acceptable for us to be goons, and we’ve been goons. It still goes on. It is beyond stupidity.

DAVIDSON: We’ve talked about Afghanistan as the first place where we went to “get the bad guys.” Jon Lee, you were in Afghanistan when the bombing began, in October, 2001; you also went back there last year. Did you get a sense, when you were there, that somehow justice had been done, for the victims of 9/11—or, for that matter, for the Afghans?

ANDERSON: There’s no question that the American action—the coalition action—in Afghanistan achieved one thing: removing Al Qaeda from the almost aboveground role it had, pretty much steering the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. This isn’t political rhetoric—it had a preëminent role in the country, it funded the Taliban regime, and it provided an open base of operations for terrorists seeking to do harm to any number of regimes, including the United States. That was achieved, but it was not a total victory. The Taliban fled into the hills; Osama bin Laden escaped. And then, really, I think, the West—the United States and its coalition partners—sat on their hands. The Afghans were putty, so to speak. They had no expectations—other than every expectation of the West. We were the dreamland. We were that shimmering United States of the Kennedy era, still, in their imaginations. We were capable of doing anything for them. They were in our thrall. We could have done so much in Afghanistan to send an important message around the world; we could have done the right thing in that country. But we didn’t. We had our Special Forces guys doing what they needed to do, which was mop up and try to pursue the remnants of Al Qaeda and some of the Taliban. But what did the Afghans see on the ground? There was no effort to engage them truly in the battle of ideas, other than the amiable Western-handpicked figure of Hamid Karzai, who was soon seen as a puppet President; there was no visible or muscular empowerment of his government or, for that matter, of the international aid agencies in transforming a country that had been destroyed through three decades of war.

DAVIDSON: Sy, you’ve written a lot about the intelligence failures that led to 9/11. Again, right after 9/11 there was a lot of talk about how the way that the intelligence community dealt with and found information had to change. Has it changed? If so, is it for the better or for the worse?

HERSH: I actually think things are much worse, in that a lot of very capable people have got disgusted and discouraged and have left, and I think that the new system set up by the 9/11 Commission is going to be a disaster, too. So I’m skeptical. As I said earlier, in the field there are some people trying to be more progressive and use networking and more sophisticated means of going after the real hard-core jihadis’ terrorist cells, and we’ve done well that way, but it was such a blunderbuss approach in the beginning. Look, the bottom line is, you have a White House that, as George said early in this conversation, doesn’t want any information that it doesn’t want. There’s nothing new about it, and nothing has changed. We’re still in, I think, very dire shape.

DAVIDSON: The White House would say we have to give up some expectations about, say, the privacy of telephone calls, to make sure that 9/11 doesn’t happen again.

HERSH: There are ways to deal with that within the confines of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and this Administration chose not to do that, for whatever reason—for security, or because it didn’t want people to know what was going on. They’ve demonstrated a contempt for the Constitution. We really have a constitutional crisis. We’ve got a crisis in terms of what’s going on in Iraq: as Jon Lee said, a civil war is going on there; we just don’t want to use those words.

DAVIDSON: Is America stronger now than it was five years ago?

HERSH: Oh, my God—nobody would argue that. Nobody would say that. You’ve just heard thirty minutes of conversation about how we are perceived. We haven’t done the right thing in terms of reconstruction; we haven’t done the right thing in Iraq. There’s no conceivable way we’re in better shape. Why there hasn’t been an attack in the United States—I don’t have an answer for that, but I don’t believe that’s going to be a political vehicle for George W. Bush. We’re not stronger, in any sense, because we’re not nearly as respected, and the invincibility shield is gone.

DAVIDSON: Jon Lee, going back to September 10, 2001—you were about to leave for Sri Lanka. That trip got put off, and you never ended up going. Do you think that there are parts of the world that America has neglected since 9/11?

ANDERSON: Absolutely. Just as it had, in fact, before 9/11. What I was doing then for The New Yorker was going around to parts of the world that I felt had been neglected since the Cold War, and that particularly interested me. In fact, Afghanistan was one of my target countries, but I didn’t get to it until after 9/11. Sri Lanka was a more obscure one—because there wasn’t a direct American angle there. As an American who’s lived much of my life abroad, I have often felt the disjointedness between our perceptions at home and people’s perceptions of us abroad. As an American, the perpetual stranger in the strange land, I’ve often taken it on the nose as the representative of my country. I was very keenly, acutely, and poignantly aware, in the late nineties and very early two-thousands, of a sense of abandonment of past responsibility, of a huge and, in some cases, quite destructive legacy that we had left during our many years of efforts to combat the Soviet expansion in Third World countries. We had left a huge hole; we had ceased to be the good Americans there. People were still waiting for us. The Clinton years have to be looked back on as almost golden years, despite the many mistakes in foreign policy Clinton made. The United States had somehow achieved, once again, this sense of promise in the world. Maybe it was the afterglow of the collapse of the Soviet Union. But it all changed, as Sy and George were pointing out, as a result of the language chosen and the political decisions taken, about how America would respond to the new threat against it. We’ve had many opportunities since then to right the course, to alter those perceptions which have deepened and deepened—perceptions of bitterness and enmity toward America for not shouldering its true responsibilities.

DAVIDSON: But, even if we’re not loved, are we stronger?

ANDERSON: No. No. Because we have lost the respect of our enemies. Why was it that in Iraq there was an interregnum between the time Baghdad fell and the time the so-called insurgents began attacking us? Because they finally saw us on the ground. First, it was an air war, and a sort of blitzkrieg infantry campaign to the capital. Then our troops began fanning out and becoming custodians of law and order. It was then that the defeated enemy—or, rather, an enemy that had vanished or melted away but had not felt itself defeated—waiting and watching in the shadows, decided to strike, decided that we were killable. Why were we killable? Because they were able to observe us at close hand and see that we operated without the logic of a superpower that knew what it wanted to do. We did not have mastery of the terrain, the language, the culture; there was an open debate about what we wanted. We were attackable. And so our enemies lost their respect for all of our billions of dollars’ worth of hardware. And we now have one of the most vicious insurgencies in the world there. A year ago, we were also under the illusion, the rosy illusion, that Afghanistan had largely been resolved, that the Taliban were in the hills, Karzai’s government was getting stronger, we were building a great new American Embassy—but no other building in Kabul—and now the Taliban have come back. They no longer fear us, either. We are not stronger, because our enemies do not believe we are strong, and until the United States understands this and figures out how to reconfigure its position in the world and make people respect it for itself as well as for its military might, properly applied, we are fighting an uphill battle.