Look back in anger
Discussions over 9/11's legacy tend to overlook the awfulness of the event itself
The British writer Christopher Hitchens can’t have been alone in watching the Twin Towers collapse and feeling “exhilaration”. The old Trot turned neocon, to use his opponents’ description, saw it as the opening shot “in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate.”
Being only nine years’ old and enjoying a visit to a friend’s house in the afternoon of 11 September 2001, I don’t recall my response. It probably wasn’t exhilaration. Certainly I would not have seen it in the civilisational struggle terms that many did, which guided foreign policy for many years later.
As it happens Hitchens and the clash of civilisations thesis caught up with me later in the decade, after Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion became the first political book I read. For a while New Atheism seemed like a powerful force in politics, marshalling the forces of reason against the faithful.
Now not so much. Unlike Hitchens I watched the opening segment of Netflix's 9/11 documentary Turning Point not with exhilaration, but helpless fury. The recordings of people calling the authorities from hijacked aircraft, not knowing but maybe sensing they were going to die, are among the most affecting remnants of that day.
For years America did not move me as an object of affection, perhaps out of a kneejerk distrust of top dogs. Many visits to the country and a minor obsession with its revolutionary history have changed that. Now I wonder whether I’d be as upset about tapes of the attacks in Paris from November 2015. Peut être. But I suspect there is something distinct about America.
By way of explanation, I’m tempted to quote 19th century writer Alexis de Tocqueville’s suggestion that “the American is the Englishman left to himself.” Growing up in England you can’t entirely shake the notion that Americans are cousins rather than foreigners, even if the feeling from the increasingly un-English States grows less mutual by the decade.
Perhaps I’ve just internalised Nato’s most important clause: “an armed attack against one or more of [the allies] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all”. 9/11 was the only time the clause has been activated, preparing the way for the occupation of Afghanistan.
Even had it not been, one can have little doubt that the attack was a first strike against the West in general, rather than America in particular. President George Bush told the makers of the 9/11: Inside the President's War Room documentary that his response had prevented similar attacks in the States (a dubious claim in itself), but America’s allies have suffered plenty in the intervening years on that front.
The recent rupture over the AUKUS alliance between ‘Les Anglo-Saxons’ and France suggests that the Nato alliance has seen better days. But more important than the diplomatic handbags is the signal that we will spend the rest of the decade worrying about China rather than Islamic terrorism.
Those countries that we invaded or bombed in the post-9/11 interventions do not look much better for it, and any progress towards liberal democracy seems faltering at best. On those grounds, often cited as motivation by war hawks, one can conclude that Bush’s policy was a failure.
If instead those invasions, air strikes and other military deployments were about revenge, perhaps it was not such a waste of time. As Bush addressed firemen amid the debris of Ground Zero, he could sense the appetite was not for conciliation, but for violent reprisal. If that was the mood of the country, it got what it wanted.
Compare the response to the Manchester bombings in 2017, where crowds sang Don’t Look Back in Anger at a vigil a few days after. I’d say anger was an acceptable response to children being killed at a gig, but Britain seemed to shrug and move on, having grown used to such atrocities.
Americans do not seem as neglectful on this count. I was surprised by how moving I found the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero when I visited three years ago. Two square pools outline where the towers used to be, pits in the middle of each allowing the water to cascade down, seemingly into the abyss.