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Post date 09.12.01

On Tuesday morning, September 11, from my window on lower Manhattan, I watched the twenty-first century begin. Of that I am certain. What I don't know is how to convey what I saw: two commercial airlcraft slam into the World Trade Center, followed by the conflagration and collapse of the buildings. Where there was once something -- elegant, soaring, confident -- there is now nothing. The twin towers, symbol of the world's capital, are a void, filled as I write with billowing smoke from the rubble. We have been offered a glimpse into a possible future.

In the twentieth century, war was made on civilians. In the twenty-first century, war will be made by civilians. It will be the definitive "faith-based initiative," requiring neither guns, tanks, ships, planes, nor missiles. Like other faith-based initiatives it will bypass the conventional state. All it will need is planning skills and a willingness to die for your beliefs. Everything else -- machinery, technology, targets -- will be furnished by civil society, its victim. The point of such warfare will not be to achieve an objective, much less win a final victory. It will be -- it already is -- simply to make a point.

In his televised speech on Tuesday night, President Bush misunderstood this completely. "They cannot dent the steel of American resolve," he asserted. But "they" were not trying to dent the steel of American resolve. They wanted to knock down the World Trade Center and blow up the
Pentagon, and they succeeded. Their point was very well-made: The United States is vulnerable.

When Mao Zedong first called the United States a "paper tiger," he knew he was whistling in the
dark. But today is different. The contrast between American military bombast and the country's
real exposure is palpable; until Tuesday morning, however, it was not understood by Americans
themselves.

In recent years Americans have watched a spate of movie epics in which the United States wins
World War II single-handedly and with valiant aplomb; in an earlier cycle, muscle-bound, bare-
chested American heroes, wrapped (often literally) in the Stars and Stripes refought the Vietnam
War and other wars to U.S. advantage. I have watched some of these films in cinemas and on
televisions-in Europe, in countries and among people well-disposed toward Americans. The
commentaries have not been flattering. Elsewhere the temptation has been growing for years: to
see in the bubble of American preening and pride an irresistible invitation to prick.

This urge to humiliate the United States has been made still more attractive by contemporary
American reluctance to contemplate death in war. For all committed terrorists, now and in times
past, death is an acceptable fee for a successful mission. For today's faith-based terrorists, it is the preferred price-the reward. Western European states, which accept military casualties as the price of resolve and have grown accustomed to a limited risk of civilian death, understand this mentality and partly for that reason make unsatisfactory symbolic targets. But Americans have made a virtue -- some might say a fetish -- of risk-free war. The special delight taken in causing large numbers of American deaths should thus not be underestimated.

The American domestic response is of anxious disorientation. Europeans, faced with a terrorist
campaign, typically ask, "Why does this happen?" Every American I have spoken to or heard on
television in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe has demanded "How could this happen?" -- i.e., who let this happen? -- as though the default position in modern life were 100 percent
personal and collective security. Will this now change? Are we, after Pearl Harbor and the
assassination of JFK, watching the end of American innocence -- so often announced, so long
postponed?

It is too soon to say. But something at least will be gained if three lessons are learned in
Washington. The first is that the obsession with "missile defense" is a monstrous dereliction of
duty. To be sure, there may be criminal states and obsessed individuals who dream even now of firing off an intercontinental missile. But that is their least likely weapon of choice, precisely
because it so clearly advertises its point of origin and its owner. If I am right and the threat in coming decades is from men and organizations that want to make a point and mock and humble their adversary, then missile defense expenditure is a criminal waste.

The second lesson concerns the Middle East, the most likely source of such attacks now and in
coming years. Like it or not, Israel is seen from Morocco to Pakistan as a surrogate for the United
States. What Israel does, America will be blamed for. Israel will be the excuse and the catalyst for attacks on America. This will not change. The United States is thus not an optional presence in the Israel-Arab conflict, a great power that can choose, as the Bush administration has chosen, to fold its arms and step back from the front. When Israel applies tactics of which Washington disapproves -- as it has done on recent occasions -- it is America, as much as Israel, that becomes a target. That is no reason to abandon Israel to its fate. It is time to make a virtue of necessity -- since this is America's conflict willy-nilly, it is in our interest to get in there and find a way to peace.

The third lesson is the most important one. On Tuesday evening, Republican Senator John Warner, of the Senate Armed Services Committee, stood in the Pentagon and declared: "We call upon the entire world to step up and help." And so it will -- as most of the rest of the world well knows, we are all in this together. But American officials have spent the last few months denouncing treaties, promising a U.S. retreat from crisis zones, and explaining that the administration plans to put "U.S. national interests" first. It is good to hear conservative American politicians acknowledge that American national interests and those of the rest of the civilized world are utterly intertwined. But it would have been better if they had reached this conclusion a little sooner.

We live in a globalized political era. It is not just the financial markets that know no frontiers (and it was not without significance that terrorists targeted the World Trade Center, whose very name they took as a standing challenge and reproof). American national interests have no meaning in isolation. Alliances, treaties, international laws, courts, and agencies are not an alternative to national security -- they are its only hope. The rest is showy hardware and vain boasting. Will the present administration grasp this uncomfortable truth? I don't know, but I fear that it won't. It may be left to a future American leader, even to a new generation, to seize the full measure of this national disaster.

There is a frightening, rubble-strewn emptiness where those proud towers stood just yesterday. A new era has begun.