NEW Yorkers are being warned that US intelligence has specific information that Al-Qaeda is planning another attack on the city, this time on key financial institutions. At the start of last month, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced that there were credible reports that Osama Bin Laden was planning to disrupt the November elections.
Since Sept. 11 Americans have become predisposed to believe that they are going to be the victims of further terror assaults on their own territory. The trauma of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks and the planned smashing of United Airlines Flight 93 into the White House have had a profound effect. This is in part because they were spectacular in the way that so much about the United States itself is spectacular.
Yet looked at from another angle, the total death toll of some three thousand people should be measured against terrorist depravities elsewhere in the world — such as the cold-blooded butchery of 5000 men and boys by Serb militias at Srebrenica or the murder of maybe as many as 50,000 Sudanese inhabitants of Darfur by pro-government thugs. What hurt more than anything about the terrible events of Sept. 11 was the humiliation of America and the shocking destruction on its complacent acceptance that whatever may have been happening elsewhere in the world, the United States itself was immune from international terror.
It would have been a hard man that said on Sept. 11 “Welcome to the real world” but these appalling crimes were indeed an initiation of Americans to the agony and fear that many other countries have long been forced to endure. Indeed some US citizens once poured money into Irish Republican charities even though they were warned that it was likely to fund the violence in Northern Ireland. However because they could not conceive of the depraved reality of bodies blown apart by IRA high explosives, because they chose to focus on the romance on the historic Fenian struggle against British domination, they pulled out their pocket books and gave generously.
Americans still have much to learn about terror. Many parts of the world have suffered long and terrible campaigns by vicious bigots, who bomb and assassinate with bloody incoherence. Nevertheless a sense of proportion is necessary. In recent history, no terrorist organization has triumphed. Extensive though the damage done by these brutes has been, the victim societies have learned to take away the bodies, do the forensic science, wash away the blood, clear up the site and rebuild. The human capacity to overcome and carry on in the face of the most stunning disaster is itself quite remarkable. Countries with far less in the way of wealth resources than the United States have managed it time and again. It is possible because these countries will not be panicked. It is possible because they know that however gross the terror attacks may be, they cannot be fatally damaging to the society that they target.
Thus America’s jitteriness, while understandable, is in part inappropriate. The reality is that nothing that Al-Qaeda could do would inflict massive harm upon a country as vast and as strong at the USA. New Yorkers still bear the scars of Sept. 11 but despite that massive shock, America’s commercial capital was up and running again within days of the wicked crime. Americans need to confront terrorism with calm determination and not with alarm. To panic is to give the terrorists an easy victory.
