Brooks Kraft LLC/Corbis via Getty Images)
The historian Tony Judt caught the mood, “From my window in lower Manhattan, I watched the 21st Century begin.”
Right — and yet, in that appealingly strict dichotomy, a little bit wrong as well. And wrong in a way that matters now as we survey the scene 20 years on.
A personal memory to illustrate my point: why, in the summer of 2001, would you want to go to America to work as a BBC correspondent? America: devoid of news, its politics dull, its people porky and contented. Stay in Europe, my Brussels colleagues said, where everything is happening. The Euro is coming! The Commission has resigned and is being rebuilt! The Finns have the presidency and we’re all going to Lapland!
I hated Brussels — mainly for the weather (living on the inside of a milk bottle someone said) — but I couldn’t deny that the news was all there. From the day, in 1999, when the Austrian farm commissioner, Franz Fischler, presaged the commission’s demise with the immortal line: “I’ve resigned. I’m going for a drink,” we felt, those of us lucky to be in the Brussels press corps, at the very centre of the universe.
But, still, I hankered after the USA. The BBC view was that it was largely a features-led role — injuries caused by shark attacks were the biggest news — which required some considerable imagination to get stories that would make it onto programmes in London. A senior editor said he thought I could do better; he suggested Vietnam. But if I insisted, then my application for the vacant job of Washington Correspondent would be considered.
In my interview, I burbled about the sharks and a near-miss between a Chinese and US plane. I tried hard to hide the fact that my central concern was to see sunshine. When I got the job, I asked to delay until 2002 because I wanted to see my last real news: the introduction of Euro notes and coins at the beginning of that year. Nobody thought that a problem: a fill-in was sent to cover.
What I have just described seems now to have a faintly ludicrous, almost feckless feel to it. That’s because I think we characterise our recent history according to our current psychological state. Powered by Tony Judt’s abrupt division — before and after the twin towers — we have decided to remember the months, the years, before 9/11 as a waste of time and space, and the months and years afterwards as an angry violent period of endless wars and triumphalism and failed nation building.
From shark attacks to imperial hubris in the passing of a morning. It’s neat but it’s nonsense. My memory of Washington life – when I arrived, finally, in mid-2002 – suggests to me that the Judt picture needs revision. A period needs to be inserted between that September day and the mission of Donald Rumsfeld et al. It fuelled the mission far more than the fantasies of some neo-cons. It powered everything in my early months in Washington. It coloured all politics, all journalism, all of life.
It was fear.
We forget the fear.
I remember an early visit, after arriving in Washington DC to the hardware store to buy duct tape for the windows. We had been advised that this might be helpful in the event of a chemical or biological attack. That was what was people were expecting. Everyone thought another blow was coming and that it would be worse.
But this wasn’t what I had expected. I had come to Washington to live in a film set: I had in mind The West Wing or any number of movies in which the city shimmers as the backdrop for some eventually successful power play, a place of consequence, polished white monuments, polished black cars. Everyone and everything recognisable. Slick repartee leading to bold American decisions: “Let’s do this!”
Now we were halfway to The Road: dystopia beckoned. In the sky there was the roar of fighter jets, random but constant. On the ground there was duct tape and a glassy-eyed sense that the end times were upon us. At a dinner party to welcome us to Washington the host raised a glass for a toast: “Death to al-Qaeda!” I nearly choked but the other guests jutted out their chins and swallowed hard, as if thirsty, or just plain frightened.
This atmosphere did have consequences. As the international relations scholar, Robert Kagan has suggested, it fuelled the Bush administration’s desire to do something, not out of a sense of imperial hubris but because America was on edge;
“For better or for worse,” Kagan wrote recently in the Washington Post, “it was fear that drove the United States into Afghanistan… A collective failure today to recall what the world looked like to Americans after 9/11 has certainly clouded our understanding of the consequential decisions taken in those first years.”
The idea of a cheerful and gung-ho crowd setting off on an adventure they had always had up their sleeve, always wanted to have an excuse to use, doesn’t tally with what I experienced in Washington DC.
I saw a previously sure-footed place stumbling. At the hardware store and at the office, including the Oval Office.
And then came a new round of killing. Small in scale, but psychologically undermining, they re-opened the bigger wounds. One death, in October 2002, was close to my home in peaceful north west Washington: a woman called Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera was filling her car with petrol when there was a sound described as “like a tyre blowing out”.
She was shot. At the age of 25. Married with a three-year old daughter. She was one of 17 victims of a duo who became known as the Washington snipers. They had a rifle with a long-distance sight and a car with a boot they had adapted to allow them to fire from. In a world of spiralling violence, a world in which fussing about shark attacks and the Euro notes and coins seemed so distant, the snipers added to the potent mix. I called my wife once from the corridor in the Pentagon outside the office of the deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to tell her there had been another shooting and maybe the kids should go home from the park. This was not normal and yet it was; it had become normal. Down the corridor there was a hole in the Pentagon where one of the 9/11 planes had hit. Who knew what normal was, or would be?
Even when the snipers were caught there was no sense of proper victory: their evil derangement (the older man had been damaged in the army, the younger was just angry) seemed to add to a sense of a world losing its moorings.
The British writer Jonathan Raban, writing in 2004 about his adopted nation, said: “It’s as if America, since September 11th, has been reconstituted as a colonial New England village, walled in behind a stockade to keep out Indians.”
That was the mentality: I saw no hubris on the streets of Washington DC. Only unity and fear.
Justin Webb presents the Americast podcast and Today on Radio Four. His Panorama documentary “Trump the Sequel”, is available now on Iplayer
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SubscribeMy father used to sigh at certain things that, if they didn’t already exist today, you would never be allowed to invent. Insurance; credit cards; GCSEs; that sort of thing.
So imagine if you tried today to start a movement that advocated “honour killing”, the oppression of women including legally making them chattels and third-class citizens who can be stoned to death, and that insisted you share its belief in a bloodthirsty, murderous, omnipotent fairy. Imagine further that this movement advocated the killing of gays and Jews, ordered the murder of its critics, doubters and apostates, and sought the murder or enslavement of anyone else who didn’t accept its agenda.
You wouldn’t get very far. Yet that was the enemy America faced after 9/11, which Americans were not, however, allowed to criticise. I think a part of the fear and confusion post-9/11 arose from the sheer evil weirdness of the enemy, whom Americans were nonetheless expected to treat with deference and respect.
It’s as though in 1944 we had invaded Europe bent on removing the occupier, but with being allowed in any way to criticise the regime’s beliefs or to suggest there was anything wrong with gassing people you hated.
The fact is that throughout history, civilisations have arisen that did not deserve to survive. The Aztecs were absolutely the sᴉzɐN of mesoAmerica, and while it’s fashionable to criticise the Conquistadors for wiping them out (because their art was pretty), so what? They were one of the ugliest cultures ever to deface the world, which was indisputably a better place without their horrendous evil.
Some civilisations are such only in the strict sense of having civic institutions, while being at the same time utterly, irredeemably morally incompetent. And that’s America’s enemy, and I don’t know what the answer is, but denying it has sent America mad.
Just the sun and sharks? 2001 still echoed: the Cold War’s reverberating global shake-downs and tectonics for the future US power-balance; a decade of Islamic terror attacks between the 1st Twin Towers and Kenya/Cole bombs and clear al-Qaeda intent; already dangerous divisions in US society highlighted by stalemate elections; financial crises mixed with the tech shift; and LatAm. Tax-funded career journalists on have scant incentive to rock the boat by sniffing out hard news – in the US, UK or Europe. Bored one may be, but the latter-day irony was that routine press-pack reporting and the lapping up of Trump’s tweets and baits helped to put him in power, while mundane and obedient reporting of the EU left the UK public largely in the dark – until the 2008 Greek crsis, for example, helped to show the Euro playbook.
I think this article rightly focusses on the fear and confusion after 9/11, and the sense of disorientation–that such an atrocity could have occurred on US soil. I must admit I’d forgotten the general concern that the twin towers attack (and the attack on the Pentagon) was perhaps the first in a wave of attacks.
The only thing that puzzles me about this piece is the header (or whatever the text immediately beneath the title is called): “We wrongly characterise the post-9/11 years as a period of triumphalism.” Did someone characterize the post-9/11 period as triumphal?
The image accompanying the article shows the immensely arrogant Rumsfeld behind President Bush. He might have been given to triumphalism but there were few others. I recall a sense of justice-being-done when the first reports came back of the US air force bombing targets in Afghanistan. But that wasn’t triumphalism.
As the twenty year war in the middle east progressed our sense of payback changed to one of puzzlement about the overall goals of these military operations, then a sense of disillusionment, then, although I’m ashamed to say it, indifference. And now we’ve bungled our departure and no one is talking about triumph.
I suppose it must be different for the Americans than the Brits. Britain has always had the threat of invasion from its neighbours throughout its entire history right up until the Second World War. Once that subsided there’s been bombings and attacks from the likes of the IRA and Al Queda/ISIS. It’s nothing new to Brits, it’s just built into the psyche over centuries.
For the Americans something like that happening on home soil was an entirely new experience, they presumably had no idea how to carry on in the weeks and months afterwards.
Very true, and the most revealing part was the constant “Why Do they Hate Us?” media shock. The very inability to conceive of a ready answer to this, after decades of failed M East initiatives, stagnated Cold War dictatorships, rising terrorism and new global challengers surely added to the public’s psychological trauma – itself conditioned by a deep failure of news reporting and analysis at what was palpably a dangerous time oddly focused on Lewinsky.
The US is in a war with China, Russia, white supremacy, islam in general but Iran in particular[1], secular Middle Eastern regimes, socialism in general especially Cuba and Venezuela, and if the Democrats are power homophobia and transphobia. It’s going to be a long century.
[1] but not Saudi or Pakistan, as I mentioned above.
It would be really hard for a future historian to explain the Afghanistan invasion, though.
America is attacked by Al Queda, whose leader is supposedly holed up in Afghanistan. They invade. So far so good.
Osama isn’t there. Osama is in the neighbouring and supposedly friendly country Pakistan. He’s killed a decade later. The US stays in Afghanistan for 20 years.
If you are invading to kill or capture a guy who is supposed to be in a country, then your intelligence agencies should be certain he is actually in that country before invading. Invasions cost lives and money.
If you find out he isn’t there there then a quick firing of all intelligence agents should be in order. If the intelligence agencies did know he was in Pakistan soon after then the war should have ended in Afghanistan and major pressure put on Pakistan. If they didn’t know until he was killed, a decade later, then another round of firings. Nothing like that happened. Same clowns running the show.
With osama killed, what pressure was put on Pakistan? Still seems to be an “ally”. What’s going on?
I have no explanations either. No conspiracy, just a clown show. If I were to guess I would guess that the alphabet agencies are set to fight the Cold War, and Pakistan was a Cold War ally.
The type of explosion in Beirut’s harbour last year is precisely why the Americans were suddenly deeply worried in the immediate months following 9/11, I’m sure. Moreover, the world could understand instantly post-9/11 how eager to destroy themselves in the process were teams of terrorists, not just lone wolf types. It was the stark realisation that terrorists were suddenly into ghoulishness. They had become extremely dangerous. The protective recoil in many people came out in utterances of “Why do they hate us?” As if something extremely neglectful had been committed by the American people that had badly impinged itself on the rest of the world.
That’s the point. An impingement in the eyes of the same people whose views and plans were already well known and multiply demonstrated. A huge intelligence failure followed.