So much is being written and said about this tragic moment in modern history, it is difficult to offer any perspective which has not already been explored elsewhere. Nevertheless there are some thoughts worth putting down.
The first thing that strikes about the footage everywhere being replayed, is just how terrible an event or set of events this was. Unlike the Pentagon which suffered a single strike, creating havoc, New York suffered two strikes. Moreover the twin towers, like a damaged ship stayed upright to begin with, suggesting a containable crisis, then collapsed in full view of every TV station in the world. Watching at the time I feared the dead must surely run into tens of thousands. The fact that the toll was not as bad as feared is the greatest tribute of all to the rescue services of New York, their courage, their cool heads and the success of their evacuation procedures. Indeed the calm and leadership of the dust covered Mayor must be among the best ever offered to a community in crisis.
Unfortunately the same cannot be said of the U.S Government. There was no adequate plan to defend the country against an outrage of this kind, yet plane hijacks had been common across the world for years. The anti- terror measures at airports and elsewhere were lax. The military were wholly unprepared and unrehearsed. The President, when he finally got to Washington after flying around the country for most of the day, offered not calm and defiance, but vengeance and threats. The result was that a terrorist outrage, far more spectacular then even its perpetrators had expected, which lined all the world up behind America in sympathy and solidarity, became the greatest strategic defeat in its history thus far.
Ten years on, two futile wars and a third on terror without meaning, has left it with a $1.5 trillion bill to be paid, a broken economy, massively reduced world influence and if not the end of its superpower status, the end of the era when notice had to be taken of it views. It is just emerging from a period when it was, for a time, the most unpopular nation on the planet. Its economy is shattered, along with its political consensus, to the point where on key issues of economic management and social welfare the federal government has become dysfunctional.
Indeed history may show that the magnitude of the event is even now not fully understood. Up till 9/11 the rise of United States as a power since 1865, had proved inexorable. After 9/11 its decline as a power has been marked and will continue. The good news is that with the decline of that power, will come the rise of the qualities of the American people, for too long in the shadow a federal structure and its global power projection, the very nature of which is contrary to all that is worthy in the American Dream.
But on this tenth anniversary such analysis must make way for the flow of human sympathy to all those bereaved families and individuals whose lives were shattered on that day nobody, anywhere, will ever forget.