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
