Six lessons I've learned since the September 11 attack on the WTC

Six lessons I’ve learned since September 11.

LESSON #1 – COMPLACENCY 101: The World, & the Security of America.

It wasn’t until then that we realised just how complacent we’d become.

Not until briefcases, carefully stowed in the overhead compartment, slammed into financial planner’s desktops, and their computers, and their faces. Not until tray tables and little packets of peanuts burst into elevator shafts. Or till doorknobs and post-it notes and fingernails and fax machines and Attendant Call buttons and noses and drinks menus from a swanky bar on top of the world all rained down, along with half a billion kilos of girders, and trusses, and columns, and airline creamer cups, and teeth.

And Australia sat there. Watching, from afar, in the middle of the night as it unfolded. Pouring a third stiff drink with trembling hands as the flickering TV clumsily revealed god-only-knows-what as the night wore on. And the commentator isn’t sure – he can’t make it out, but – through the dust – he can’t see… "I don’t want to be alarmist", he says, his voice wavering, just after midnight, as the camera rolls silently, focused on an impenetrably thick blanket of dust – he doesn’t want to be alarmist, but – through all that dust "I can’t see … Tower Two"… he can’t … make it out. No – holy hell, no. Neither can I.

And at sunrise, six hours later, I’m still there. In front of the TV. Drinking tea. Gasping, in unexpected waves of fitful sobs. My head propped scruffily on a limp palm. Hoping, quietly – shamefully – that maybe some country will claim responsibility so that by the time I wake up, 500 ICBMs will have removed that country and all its supporters and residents from the face of the earth. It’s a stupid, fleeting idea from an exhausted, shattered mind, and I know it. So I go to bed.

LESSON #2 – FRIENDSHIP 101: How to Kick a Pal While He’s Down.

What surprises me over the following few days is the response from citizens of countries which America considers its allies: Australia, England, Canada. In letters to the editor, in forwarded emails, on public radio talkback and in pubs – as well as the quiet, burning anger I feel – there are a surprising number of snide, flippant, pseudo-intellectual remarks about Cuba and Noriega and Cambodia and Palestine and Iraq and how – sure it’s tragic, don’t get me wrong – but how America’s been doing this sort of thing for years. What goes around comes around. Welcome to the real world. It’s terrible, but let’s face it – Uncle Sam had this coming.

"I think this will be good," my neighbour said to me over a green salad. "It’s going to bring Americans into the real world and make them more appreciative of what they’ve got." Some other critics have been slightly more veiled. "It's tragic and I don't support the attacks..." they protest, from their study rooms and lecture halls and collective action group meetings and editorials and bar stools, "but..." (and – like when racists say "I'm not racist but" – there's always a "but") "... I can understand why it happened. American oppression brought this on itself."

Such a rationale may have sounded eminently reasonable to whoever was sitting in seat 14A or seat 36G or seat 9J; or to whoever was standing at the urinal in the Tower pondering what emails he’d have to send that morning; or to whoever was inside the lift as it, along with the building, plummeted a hundred floors; or to whoever’s throat was slashed with a stanley knife in the cockpit. Yet we will never be sure whether these people supported the laudable mission of Bringing American Oppression Back On Itself, because they were torn into pieces before getting the opportunity to consider whether they wanted to be involved.

One of our best and oldest mates had its heart ripped out last week. Anyone who responds to that with a cerebral justification of Why The United States Is In The Wrong is implicitly defending the terrorists. Don’t bother appending that convenient qualifier of "I’m not saying it was right, but…" – we know what you’re saying. You’re saying you’re on the side of killers. You’re saying that evil had a point.

LESSON #3 – HYPOCRISY 101: The Rift Between Rhetoric and Reality.

Measured critical analysis of American policies – as opposed to snide denouncement of the nation as a whole – is always valid. U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East and Latin America, has commonly been callous and short-sighted. Yet the foreign policies of other countries have commonly been every bit as fitful and self-interested as America’s. Why it is singled out for disproportionate worldwide denigration is a different matter.

Enormous power brings with it far-reaching influence, and far-reaching influence magnifies mistakes. A country capable of monumental goodness must also be capable of monumental blunders. We can’t have it both ways. We cannot have a force powerful enough to do enormous good – a force which can demolish the Nazi Empire at its height, help broker peace in Northern Ireland, defeat Stalinism, and halt brutal genocide using billions of dollars’ worth of laser-guided missiles – and then expect it to be small and unassuming enough not to leave big ugly footprints when it missteps: when it deposes South American dictators and too much blood gets spilled; when it extricates itself from Vietnam and shatters eastern Cambodia; or when its funds flow to the most abusive and reactionary elements in Israel. America isn’t hated because it’s peculiarly bad; America is hated because it’s peculiarly visible.

Other Western countries, not saddled with the guardianship of such vast power, get off more lightly. When Australia was complicit in the horror of East Timor for decade after bloody decade, or when it tolerated massive destruction of Papua New Guinea’s crucial Ok Tedi river system on the part of its proudest local company, or when it pushed for and gained criminally lenient concessions on greenhouse gas emissions, the world didn’t hate it. "The world" didn’t notice. Australia’s reach is too small.

Before we cast stones, then, we should ask ourselves whose footprints would we rather see stomping around the world than America’s. History suggests that power voids tend to get filled. If America was not there, it is highly likely that someone else soon would be. Who would we prefer? China? Russia? Iraq?

Certainly, America can be hypocritical in its application of human rights and freedom throughout the world: that’s the rift between rhetoric and reality. But America is nowhere near as hypocritical as the critics who damn it for acting, yet condemn it for not getting involved.

LESSON #4 – HYPOCRISY 202: What’s Easy To See, versus What’s Hard To Accept.

It is easy to take upsides for granted and whinge about downsides. What’s harder is to take downsides in one’s stride and appreciate upsides.

Nowhere is that more true than in the case of America’s Western critics.

It’s very easy, for example, to take our standards of living for granted while whinging about America’s flashy, shallow excess. What’s harder is to step back and acknowledge that such excess is fuelled by the same faith in the free market which has made America (and, with it, every other country which chose to embrace liberal ideals) more prosperous than any people have ever been in the history of the world. Moreover, it was that same faith which beat back the potentially devastating spectre of global communism when it had a very good chance of ending civilisation as we knew it.

It’s easy to criticise a bully for going around the world shoving his big nose into every else's business. What’s harder is to step right back and acknowledge that if there were no bastion of liberal democracy going around shoving his big nose into every else's business, then there would have been no big nose to shove into Europe when the National Socialists were goose-stepping down the Champs Élysées.

It’s easy to denounce a country as big as America for shirking its international responsibilities and leaving the rest of the world to suffer in their problems alone. What’s harder is to admit is that in the last paragraph we were criticising the same country for shoving its big nose into everyone else's business, and yet we now claim just as tritely that it’s not doing enough – and such hypocrisy is typical. America is damned if it does (e.g., Milosevic) and damned it if it doesn't (e.g., Rwanda). What’s harder to admit is that we will criticise it regardless of what it does, just as long as it remains big and clumsy and arrogant and annoying – and just as long as we can feel passionate and progressive and virtuous by standing up to it.

LESSON #5 – RETALIATION 101: And Now For The REAL Danger…

Of course, the conscientious souls who took my neighbour’s criticisms of America to their purest conclusion on American Airlines flight 11 last Tuesday – had one primary goal in doing what they did, above and beyond killing Americans. They wanted to deliver to their peers a whole new generation of embittered young devotees eager to wage further, bigger suicidal wars on the West. If they were lucky, maybe they could even incite a fully-fledged World War in which western civilisation as we know it could finally be put to its sordid rest.

What they did on September 11 will not, of course, achieve that goal of inspiring a new generation of terrorists. But they never expected it to. As far as the terrorists were concerned, the really important killings were never going to take place then. The really important killings were going to take place weeks or months later. And they wouldn’t be against innocent Americans by Arab terrorists – but against innocent Arabs, by the American military. That’s how you inspire and recruit your next generation of embittered young terrorist candidates. You provoke America to beat the hell out of them for no reason. You give them something to hate, and nothing to lose.

This is not a conventional war. In reality, it is not any kind of a "war", for there is no clearly identified enemy. The military tactics that have served America so well for two centuries will not work here – indeed, they will almost certainly exacerbate the problem. There are no borders to contain; no fronts to outflank; no military compounds to target; no trenches to bomb; no governments to strike at; no "them and us". Just a convoluted, ethereal network of morphing tendrils spreading from Hamburg to Kabul to Florida to, most probably, Sydney. This is not a battle against enemies of war, but a quest for criminal fugitives. The longer it takes us to understand that distinction, the graver the problem will become.

Whenever Israel's Likud party tries to achieve peace through heavy-handed force, Israel’s civilian security tends to deteriorate notch after bloody notch. If the Bush administration makes the same mistake by falling back onto the Pentagon’s default military tack, we could be looking at Tel Aviv on a global scale. We don’t need bombs: we need evidence, and temperance, and courts of law. Anything less – or, rather, anything more – will be nothing more than a big, loud, butch band-aid… and potentially a terrifyingly counter-productive one, at that.

LESSON #6: – COMPLACENCY 202: America & the Security of The World.

And then, in the middle of that ordinary old lovely sunny autumn morning, there were suddenly hundreds of firefighters in the stairwell – literally hundreds – all caked in dust, gasping desperately, hurrying – racing – up against a torrent of stockbrokers and secretaries and IT guys on their frantic way down – and these firefighters, struggling up floor after floor after floor – deafened, choked – they were struggling up towards 90,000 litres of furious, searing, blazing, noxious AvGas which was melting carpets and computers and tray tables prudently latched in their upright positions, and the tower next door was just as bad. And these guys, from the Bronx – from uptown – from downtown – from Queens – with a little daughter just across the Hudson learning her L.M.N.O.P.’s (you’d be able to see her kindergarten from up here, if you had the time or inclination to glance out a window) – these guys were still struggling upwards floor after floor after floor, when the steel columns up top finally, creakingly, buckled, and Joe and Jake and Tom and goodness knows who else – struggling with their bulky suits and cumbersome equipment… well – they no longer had to keep racing up floor after floor after floor because floor after floor after floor was already racing down towards them.

It was in 1973 that veteran Canadian broadcaster Gordon Sinclair noted in his now famous radio editorial: "I can name to you five thousand times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble. Can you name to me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble?"

I hope that within coming months we’ll be able to say yes, in fact, we can. Because it was only last week that we suddenly realised just how complacent we’d become.

America had become complacent about security.

The rest of the world – myself included – had become complacent about America.