9/11

The Guardian -  On September 10, 2001 George W Bush travelled to Florida to push education reform legislation. AOL was seeking a big stake in AT&T’s cable unit. Promising tennis player Lleyton Hewitt, 20, had just swept Pete Sampras aside to win the US Open.

America seemed unassailable. It had won the cold war and enjoyed a relatively peaceful 1990s as “the indispensable nation”, in secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s framing. From fiscal years 1998 to 2001, the federal government recorded four consecutive budget surpluses.

But what had been dubbed “the American century” came to an apocalyptic end on the next morning. Nearly 3,000 people were killed as 19 al-Qaida hijackers seized control of four airliners, slamming two of the planes into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and the fourth into a field in western Pennsylvania….

Unthinkably, both of the 110-storey towers collapsed, unleashing giant clouds of ash and dust on the streets of lower Manhattan as fragments of paper fluttered down like confetti. David Blight, a historian who advised the museum, which opened in 2014, said: “It’s the most visual event in history – so photographed, so much footage, so many documentaries. It is so shocking, so horrifying that you can’t watch it without a certain weeping. One of the things that should never stop about 9/11 is the essential grief of it. There is a sheer sense of unspeakable loss.”

At first the loss brought out America’s better angels. Firefighters and first responders displayed inspiring courage. Ordinary citizens queued to donate blood. The nation came together as rarely before and received global sympathy, with Russia pledging support, Iran holding candlelight vigils and Nato invoking Article 5 for the first and only time in its history. Bush visited Ground Zero in New York and, wielding a megaphone, declared that “the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”

They did. The US invaded Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaida and topple its Taliban protectors, a war that would drag on for a record 20 years only for the Taliban to return. Bush then attacked Iraq on the false premise that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.

….A quarter of a century later, 100 million Americans are too young to remember 9/11 and only from this vantage point, perhaps, can the consequences be seen clearly.

….“9/11 is when things began to go wrong for the United States,” suggested Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to Bill Clinton. “The United States was at the apogee of its post-cold war power on September 10 and then, through a series of missteps and misjudgments on both the foreign and domestic front, we have thrown away a great deal of not only our power but our credibility.

“In my judgment, 9/11 set off a quarter-century of misgovernment in the United States and we’ll pay the price for that for a very long time.” More