Two years ago, in the early hours of the morning, I headed to bed in my dorm room, after wandering aimlessly around the internet. I had set my alarm for 8:45 AM, to make it to my campus job at 9.
This is my story of September 11th, 2001. A day that changed America as only a few says had done before. But it is more than that. For you see, I had seen flashes of the truth about terrorism, about our enemies, years before 9/11. But they were just that: flashes. Fleeting instances of clarity in a sea of confusion and half-truths. Part of it was my youth, my inexperience, my naivete. Part of it was that I, like so many others, simply could not grasp the sheer horror of the truth. And yet, I still knew that it was coming, though I did not know when, or where, or how.
I.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
-- Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach"
Flash back to October 1999. I had just returned from a weekend out in Washington, D.C, visiting with several high school friends. Of course, we all rode on the Metro. That next weekend, I was channel surfing when a Nightline episode came on. Its title: BioWar. It was a simulation of what would happen in a terrorist attack, with real-life police chiefs, fire chiefs, and public health leaders serving as the leaders of a fictonal city. The premise was frighteningly simple: a terrorist group disperses anthrax through the subway. The subway cars act as giant pneumatic syringes, pushing the spores through the tunnels and circulating it throughout the city. Because anthrax takes time, no one realizes what has happened until it is too late. Over the course of eight days, 50,000 people die. Thousands more are infected but live. Riots break out. The miltary is called in to restore order. The city is in chaos. All across the nation, people begin to chant, "never again," and demand that their government get the people who did this, civil liberties be damned.
But that wasn't the scary part. The scary part was that the stock footage of the subway system they used was the Washington, D.C. Metro, that I had rode on the week before (and today, I ride every day to work.)
One handful of men. One plan. Thousands dead. It was possible, this I realized. Question: Who would do something like this, and why?
A few months later, browsing in the campus bookstore, I came across The New Terrorists. I read it, cover to cover. Now I was worried. I began to read more. I learned the names of Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. I saw the profile of radical Islamic terrror. I read about the first WTC bombing, the destruction of our embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam. Here is what Ramzi Yousef, the first World Trade Center bomber, said at his sentencing:
"This case is not aboit so-called terrorists who planted a bomb for no reason but to kill innocent people for the fun of it. What this case is about is about the outcome of terrorism… You have been supporting Israel throughout all the years in killing and torturing peoples, innocent peoples…. You enjoy seeking people having war together. You enjoy sucking blood and shedding blood… you are the first one who introduced this type of terrorism to the history of mankind when you dropped an atomic bomb... And since this is the way you invented… [it] was necessary to use the same means against you because this is the only language you understand."
Suddenly, I understood why they wanted to do us such harm. It wasn't because we had "oppressed them," it wasn't because we hadn't done them any harm. In fact, my cousin was then serving in the Army in Bosnia, defending innocent Muslims and keeping the peace; not to mention the numerous wars our country undertook to save Muslim lives, even at the cost of our own: peacekeeping in Lebanon, fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, hunting down warlords using food as a weapon in Somalia, liberating Kuwait from a rampaging Iraq seeking only profit. And their justification for attacking us was...the Crusades? Israel? The bombing of Hiroshima? The "decadence" of Western Society? No. There was something behind all of this. They hated America. They hated our freedom, the way we had grown and prospered as a nation while they, the faithful, were being left in the historical dust. They hated the way that American ideas were opening the minds of their children, to a world of freedom and possibilities, and away from tyrants and theocrats who exploited the name of God for their own personal gain. No, they said. We are the true believers. Our laws are perfect. Our society is perfect. If we suffer while America and her allies prosper, it must be because they are the source of evil in the world. And if the utopia they had been promised was ever to happen, America would have to die. The Dar-al-Islam, the "House of Islam" would have to conquer the Dar-al-Harb, the "House of War."
They never even considered the fact that they could be wrong.
They had declared war on us.
"...In compliance with Allah's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims:
The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, 'and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,' and 'fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah.' ... We -- with Allah's help -- call on every Muslim who believes in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson. "
-- Osama Bin Laden, Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, Feb. 23, 1998
Funny thing is, we didn't even know we were at war. Yet.
The major conflict in theoretical International Relations in the late 1990's lay between two authors, representing two distinct points of view. The first view was the "End of History." Francis Fukuyama, the author of the book that defined this school, made the case that with the end of the Cold War, humanity had come to the end of a linear history. "A true global culture has emerged, centering around technologically driven economic growth and the capitalist social relations necessary to produce and sustain it." Fukuyama wrote that liberal democracy, the winner of the Cold War, was the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution'' and the "final form of human government." All that was left now was to wait for the rest of the world to come around to our side. Like Marx, Fukuyama's history was one of simple inevitability. There was simply no better choice.
The other view was much less hopeful. This side began with Samuel Huntington's book "The Clash of Civilizations." Huntington believed that the Cold War was an anomaly. He believed that human beings define themselves not by ideology, but by culture. The source of new global conflict would not be about which political ideology you follow. It will be much simpler: "What are you?" Most controversial in this thesis was Huntington's conviction that "Islam has bloody borders." To Huntington, Muslim countries constantly fought with people over religion: Christians in the Phillipines, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, animists in the Sudan, athiests in the Soviet Union. He argued that the West should worry not about Islamic fundamentalism but about Islam itself, in his words, "a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power."
And so the debate raged among the academics. But among the students, the people who gave any creedence to the Clash were a distinct minority. In my first IR class ever, I started out as Huntington's most rabid defender (mostly because I had read his book in high school.) But the pressure mounted against the Clashists was intense, both inside class and out. We were basically accused of seeing things that weren't there. We were "looking for a new enemy to replace the Soviets." We were "a bunch of angry white men with no countries left to beat up on." We were "being manipulated by the headlines." We were "ignoring the signs of progress around the world." Worst of all, our beliefs and thoughts were "a self-fulfilling prophecy:" If we believed all out war was coming, then it would come. If we believed that peace was upon us, it would be so. Eventually the pressure got too great, and not having the intellectual tenacity of my peers, I surrendered, with the joke that we need to start a group called "Clashists Anonymous," to help people break free of the Clash. Other Clashists persisted in their error, while my attention drifted to other things. Still, deep down, I wondered. As I began to understand why the terrorists wanted to do us such harm, I began to ask, what if I had been right the first time? What if something was happening on the other side of the world?
The end result of my thinking and research was a paper for my seminar in American Foreign Policy about "Catastrophic Terrorism." Who would do it, why, what would happen, and how could it be prevented. I wasn't a Cassandra. In retrospect, I missed the mark in three big places. First, I had argued that the Christian Identity movement, the heady brew of racism and fear of government that had given us the Oklahoma City bombing, was as equally likely to commit an act of serious terrorism as Al-Qaeda. (Actually, that attack, I later came to believe, had single-handedly destroyed the Christian Identity movement, most of whose members recoiled in horror at the destruction carried out in their name and promptly left for the fields of more mainstream political views, leaving only a small group of diehards without any resources or mass appeal.) Second, I had failed to consider the possibility that one does not need a nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon to cause a lot of death. In fact, the intent of the first WTC bombers had been to cause one tower to topple into the other, potentially killing all the occupants inside within a matter of seconds. Why go to all the trouble of developing a WMD when a well-placed conventional explosive can do the same thing? Or even better, turn the volatile fuel that powers cars and airplanes into an explosive? Finally, I had overestimated the effects of a potential attack on people percieved to have supported it; in this case, American Muslims. I had thought of raising the possibility that there would be mass violence against Muslims, even a mass internment of Muslims as had happened to the Japanese during WWII (an idea which I removed from my paper at the last minute). Turns out, thank God, there was no such reaction. The American people were smarter than most pundits gave them credit for, and understood that Islam itself wasn't the enemy. Undoubtedly this was because many Americans knew Muslims. My roomate that year happened to be a Muslim... from Indiana, of all places. I bounced several thoughts off of him as I was writing this paper. His reaction to the terrorists I profiled was stark: "These guys aren't Muslims. I don't know what religion they follow, but it's not mine." 99.99% of Americans would understand this when the chips fell. Let it never be said that this country hates Muslims. Ever.
But a good part of my paper was pretty close to the way it happened. The motives of the terrorists (hatred of the U.S, religious fanaticism, percieved oppression, media attention, and "macroterrorism" -- a big word for killing a lot of people). Where they trained and operated from (Afghanistan). Who supported them (Islamic "charities"). What would happen afterward (cleanup costs of the attack, a military response and changes in national security strategy, pressure to curtail civil liberties and give government agencies more power, doubts in the government's ability to protect us.) How we could stop it (Consolidation of government agencies, sharing information between intelligence and law enforcement, use of more human intelligence, including "dirty assets," use of RICO-style laws and roving wiretaps). My overall conclusion was simple. Terrorists will not stop hating us, and we cannot change our national policies to accomodate them. All we can do is prepare.
I turned in the paper. Got an A. Heard rumors that somehow this paper made it to one of the big poohbahs in the intelligence community who happened to be an alumni. And that was the end of it. Life went on. I continued with my studies. And the few people with influence who still took the threat of terrorism truly seriously continued to toil in obscurity. The rest of the world still mocked them for seeing things that weren't there; like so many Cassandras, they knew the future but could not make others understand. And I still couldn't stop thinking about when it would happen, how much time we had.
War was coming.
September 11th, 2001, dawned like any other day. Specifically, with me trying to squeeze every precious minute of sleep I can to make up for the time I wasted last night on the internet. My TV's alarm went off at 8:45 AM. Right on schedule. CNN flicked on. News blather. Gary Condit or some such stuff. Yawn. I figured five more minutes of sleep would be nice. I reset the alarm for 8:50 AM, and went back to sleep. Five minutes later, CNN was back on. But there was no blather. There were live shots of the World Trade Center's North Tower on fire. Strangely enough, I wasn't worried. I figured that a plane landing at JFK or Laguardia had miscalculated. I knew that something similar had happened at the Empire State Building in 1945. No crisis. I got up, and began getting dressed.
9 AM came. I was going to be a few minutes late for work, but not much, certainly forgiveable. I'd just say I was watching the news. I had the TV turned so I could watch it from the bathroom. Just as I finished combing my hair, I heard the newscasters gasp. I turned just in time to see the South Tower erupt into a massive fireball.
It suddenly hit me. This was no accident. There are no coincidences this big. This was deliberate. We are at war.
I turned off the TV and left for work. As I shut the door, I grabbed the morning paper from my doormat. The photos and stories were of standard political fights and local news. It was the last time I would ever see the age of "normalcy" that I had grown up in, that everyone around me believed would continue forever.
I shoved the paper in my bag and headed downstairs.
(More to come. Read my paper here.)
Posted by Thief at September 11, 2003 08:46 AM