Ten years after 9/11, the world is a safer place — but not a happier one

WHERE were you on 9/11? What were you doing when you heard about the attack on the Twin Towers?

I was at Stormont that afternoon, Irish time. It was a busy day, as I recall. Three governments were trying to find ways of persuading David Trimble to return as First Minister of the Assembly after his post-dated resignation had come into effect in the absence of IRA decommissioning.

The phones were busy and I had been screening his calls. David had temporarily commandeered my third floor office looking down on Edward Carson’s statue and the mile-long drive having forsaken his own on the ground floor, the office previously used by Stormont prime ministers such as Lord Craigavon and Viscount Brookeborough. So I was in the larger ante-room but we were popping to and fro.

As usual, CNN was on the television: David and I shared a loathing for BBC News 24 and the Sky signal was frequently suspect. When the news flashed up of the first plane, American Airlines flight 11, ploughing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center I shouted for David to come and watch, there being no television in the smaller office.

We stood in silence for a few moments. What was happening? Why? Who was responsible? Was it some dreadful accident or something far more sinister? We knew that massive loss of human life was inevitable but David was the first to surmise this must be a terrorist attack.

“You had better draft a letter to Bush expressing my condolences and my support for any action he decides to take. Try and fax it through to the White House.” He saw the enormity of it and he knew instinctively where he stood.

Everyone in Ireland — or almost everyone — sympathised with the US at that time. President McAleese declared a day of national mourning but David knew action was required and, unlike many others, he would back it. Of course many wrong things have been done since in the name of 9/11 but for him — and me — an attack on the United States was an attack on civilisation itself.

I had been tapping away at my computer, David looking over my shoulder — half at the screen, half at the television — when my mobile rang. It was the American consul-general, Jane “Kai” Fort, later acting US ambassador in Dublin. I assumed she wanted to take David’s view on the events that were unfolding in New York. “Oh, hi Kai, er, how are you?” She was in typically warm mood: “So who do you think will replace John Hume when he steps down? Mark [Durkan] has it sewn up?” she asked. “Kai, I think we had better leave that. Turn on your TV and call me later. Something terrible has happened.” I hung up.

One imagines that the US diplomatic service has some kind of hotline or early warning facility to inform its representatives about major events — obviously not. Ten years ago, they didn’t. Maybe that’s changed.

Later, the irony of that fact that I was the first to tell her about 9/11 while I was drafting a letter to her president struck us both. Inevitably, in the age of 24-hour news, many of us are privy to information long before those most affected by it.

Worse was to come. The television image of the second jet colliding into the South Tower in front of my eyes played over and over in my mind for a long time afterwards. I couldn’t get it out of my head. At times like those we are all prone to ponder the deepest and darkest questions; above all, where is God? Somehow it was a time when words failed us; we needed pictures. President Bush’s words about terrorists being able to shake the foundations of the biggest buildings but not the foundations of America have scarcely stood the test of time.

The White House knew fine well to expect something like what happened that day. Specific warnings had been given, as the 9/11 Commission report detailed.

Those warnings were repeatedly, deliberately ignored — to such an embarrassing extent that Bush’s then national security advisor, Sandy Berger, would apparently later visit the National Archives and remove the most incriminating records and leave the building with the documents stuffed inside his socks.

Truly, though, 9/11 brought out the best in most of us, from New York firefighters to presidents, from blood donors to citizens observing three minutes’ silence. Whatever else one thought of the attacks, this was clearly not business as usual.

On 9/11, the good guys had been caught napping, and we knew it. This was, as has so often been said, a wake-up call. Did that day change the world? Yes, of course. But it also revealed that the world had already changed.

What to do about that change quickly became, has remained, and will long be, a matter of deep controversy. For many who opposed the subsequent military action, it was important to argue that the response of the coalition was innately disproportionate, and that the use of the word “war” was Orwellian: simply a means of justifying a sudden grab of power by the repressive State.

To categorise 9/11 reassuringly as the work of a criminal conspiracy also signalled linguistically that the act could be comprehended within existing categories, and the threat contained by pre-existing strategies.

But it seemed to me that the co-ordinated transformation of planes into guided missiles and a successful strike on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was much more than a crime. It was an act of warfare, albeit a new asymmetric form of warfare in which the enemy would not always have a return address for acts of retaliation, and would not necessarily be willing to negotiate in any meaningful way.

IT would be neat and easy to blame it all on a series of decisions taken in the White House by Bush, Clinton and their predecessors. But September 11 reflected a poisonous cultural phenomenon, too, a worldwide rising up, primarily of young Muslim men, against the trajectory of world history: against sexual liberation, against consumerism, against the soft power of the West, against what Francis Fukuyama so wrongly called the “end of history”.

The sense of common cause in Europe and America did not endure. The Madrid bombings broke the Spanish governing party. Iraq broke Tony Blair and a price was to be paid by the US Republican party too. The UN’s authority suffered terribly.

Indeed, although the removal of the al-Qaida training camps from Afghanistan was swift and successful, it is hard to think of a greater failure of public diplomacy in modern times than the presentation of the Iraq war. Osama bin Laden had no base there. Far more American lives have been lost in Iraq since 2001 than were on 9/11 itself.

Still, it is important to record the successes over the past decade. Many serious terrorist plots have been foiled. Even more hearteningly, the Arab people are in revolutionary mood but al-Qaida is nowhere to be seen, even if Islamism — in milder forms — is rampant. But we cannot turn the clock back, even if we would want to. The innocence we enjoyed until September 10, 2001 has, unfortunately, proven to have been naiveté. The world is a safer place but not a happier one.