America squanders the world’s goodwill
GRAYDON CARTER is the editor of Vanity Fair magazine and the producer of the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary 9/11, which will be rebroadcast on CBS Sunday night.
On a morning in which the sky was the colour of the vault of heaven and the temperature in the mid-70s, I was sitting on the stoop of my house in Greenwich Village reading the papers when a neighbour ran up to me and said that a plane had just crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers. We ran to the corner of Seventh Avenue, where we had an unobstructed view down to the towers. One was burning, with a massive black hole in it. A few minutes later, a commercial jet came into view, banked and knifed into the other one.
From those early moments on, New York became a city of great gestures. I don't mean the preening, parading, Rudy Giuliani sort. I mean quiet, selfless ones, by thousands of regular people who just wanted to help. Like the men and women – firefighters, cops, welders and assorted specialists – who came from all parts of the continent to aid in the search for survivors in the twisted mass of scorched steel. I was down at the area they call ground zero days after the attacks, and it was like the staging area of the D-Day invasion. Uniforms and faces of every colour. Vehicles of every type and make and origin.
The city became a vast mourning ground and its citizens comforted one another for months on end. But the effects of 9/11 – the good ones – wore off quickly. Some idiot even suggested that the event might mark the end of irony. Washington used the atrocities as an excuse for a massive power grab – hence the myriad conspiracy theories about whether it had something to do with the attacks. The nation went off a million ways, and all in the wrong direction.
What was most unexpected was how swiftly the Bush administration succeeded in destroying the tremendous outpouring of goodwill that the attacks engendered toward the U.S. from all over the globe. A decade later, our nation is severely crippled, not by threats of terrorism, but from the profligacy of our banks and the ineffectiveness of our lawmakers. Homeland Security dictates we take our shoes off at the airport, providing the illusion that we are taking every precaution, when ultimately it was Lehman Brothers we really needed protection from.
The real surprise: What didn't happen
MARGARET MacMILLAN is a Canadian historian and the warden of St. Antony's College at Oxford. Her book Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World won the 2003 Governor-General's Award for non-fiction.
Osama bin Laden and his killers believed that the destruction of the World Trade Center was the start of the final victorious jihad against Christianity and the West. How very wrong they were. Yes, the United States was shaken by the first serious attack on American soil and, yes, the Bush administration talked of the threat of Islamic fundamentalism and for a time many believed the talk.
Ten years later, though, where is al-Qaeda? Most of its leaders, including Mr. bin Laden, are dead. Its organization is in ruins; its remaining members are hunted from one temporary hiding place to another; and for all its boasting, it has not brought down any of the governments on which it declared war. It has continued to commit atrocities, to be sure, and inspired copy cats from Indonesia to Canada but it has not, as it promised, brought a universal Muslim rule any closer. Indeed it has served to drive Muslims away through its indiscriminate killing, often of co-religionists.
