LONDON, 6 September 2003 — The debate over the memorial to those who died in the Twin Towers attack of Sept. 11 2001 expresses in a concentrated way the perplexities and contradictions that the event brought in its train. Designer and developer contend over the extent to which commerce, in the shape of valuable business space in the most single-mindedly commercial city on the planet, should be sacrificed to the need to mark the loss of those who died.
The commercial argument is, in part, an assertion of continuity, expressing the faith that currency will still flow, futures will still be traded, brokers will still broke and people will still shop in the stores near their offices for all the years to come. The argument for a substantial memorial space is also, oddly enough, an argument from continuity, for it strives to put Sept. 11 in the same line as the wars, accidents and shipwrecks that have had their monuments in the past. This is because the substantial memorial that is planned, whatever the final decisions about its size and nature, suggests that the attack was a unique event. If we fully accepted that the victims of two years ago are likely to be only the first casualties in a conflict of uncertain duration, then it would be, in theory, as illogical to memorialize them as it would have been to construct a monument to the first few thousand civilians who died during the London blitz. Monuments, after all, come at the end of wars, not in the midst of them.
Implicit in the World Trade Center plans is the idea that other attacks of this scale or worse can all be prevented. The memorial meets an emotional need to believe that this is so, but the facts point in another direction, which is that sooner or later another attack will come off successfully. That success, of course, could inflict much higher casualties, and it would not necessarily be the last. Lightning can strike twice, and New York remains high on the list of possible targets.
The conclusion ought to be that preparing to live with some successful attacks is as important as trying to prevent them, and all along this has been admitted at the rhetorical level. But it has not been much acted upon, because advanced countries are so dependent upon the constant shaving of margins, the tight limitation of public services and the reduction of reserves to sustain growth and expand consumption.
The supermarket that has only what is on the shelves, the hospital that has no extra beds, the police station that can barely staff its shifts, the power grid without spare transmission capacity, the customs service that can check only one traveler in 20, the army unit that cannot function fully without calling up reservists — these are all aspects of the pared-down, just-in-time economy created in the past 30 years. It is very clever, but it is also very vulnerable.
This is only to touch on the capacity to cope with an attack in the immediate sense. How to deal with grave damage while still keeping going economies whose buoyancy is so related to confidence, morale and a degree of hedonism is an even more difficult question. And how to maintain civil liberties, or the relatively free flow of people, in these circumstances, is more problematic still.
The experience of the two world wars suggests that the impulse to bolt the doors, lock up the aliens, exclude all who might be suspect, ruthlessly monitor those “strangers” who remain and not much less ruthlessly monitor established citizens would be hard to resist. Indeed, a majority among citizens would be likely to call for such measures. These are bleak thoughts.
The truth about the two years since the attacks is that events have been less dreadful by far than some feared. The capacities of Al-Qaeda and associated groups have been put into perspective — they are less than we at first believed — and they have suffered some serious reverses. Leaders have been killed and captured. In their attacks on targets in Asia, Africa and Saudi Arabia, the extremists have exposed their local networks and lost hard-to-replace cadres.
In Afghanistan, where they are still in a military mode, they have become bolder, but it is a boldness that may cost them dear. And in Iraq, although the recent bombings that may or may not be laid at the door of Al-Qaeda have been horrendous, we are still far from a situation in which the extremists have the advantage.
Finally, their operations may well have shifted Muslim opinion more actively against them, and may also have induced some changes of mind within their own ranks. Such evolutions, toward a weariness with killing and a sense of the unrealizability of the aim, have after all been commonplace in the history of terrorism, producing the familiar split into less and more extreme wings that marks the last chapter of many an extremist story.
All this makes for some short-term optimism, and even a feeling that we may somehow muddle through — but the longer-term odds are a different matter. The American academic Michael Kenney has studied the campaign against the South American drugs networks, which have some organizational similarities to Al-Qaeda. In a recent article in Survival, the magazine of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, he showed how an impressive list of successful arrests and seizures does not necessarily add up to effective suppression. If he and others are right, the conclusion is that we may get away with it, but we may also very well not.
How the unfinished project in the Middle East, arching from Afghanistan to Israel, affects these odds is not a simple question. One of the undeniable effects of Sept. 11 was to deepen a divide between governments and peoples over how to act in the world. This was particularly so in the US and Britain, where Bush and Blair, though from different starting points, became convinced that pre-emptive action was a duty that a responsible leader had to undertake.
The democratic argument should have been about what sort of pre-emption, and when. But, even though pre-emption was well established in the public mind the average citizen still thought of major military action as justified only in response to an attack or a clear threat. Hence the ambiguities (lies to some, necessary persuasion to others) still being worked out in proceedings such as the Hutton inquiry.
