A Decade On

I felt sick for weeks after 9/11. A creeping sickness, as if something was rotting inside me. It may have been fear or revulsion, maybe a confused bodily reaction to the sudden and brutal restructuring of the world. I can still recall the uneasiness which permeated from my mind into my physical state. A decade later, I am not sure if the sickness ever left me.

That day is etched into my mind, I carry the snapshot memories in me and can recall them at a moment’s notice. Being told by a friend as I stood at the school gates, being part of the crowd in Dixons watching something unknown and terrible unfold, the endlessly replayed footage, the monotony of horror and the relief that came from finally turning off the television. The ceaseless rolling coverage of pain and suffering beamed directly into our homes magnified and intensified the event out of all knowable proportions. With every passing minute, every new second of footage, and every stilted, shocked recap America was humiliated. Humiliated at 24 frames per second. Humiliated but not humbled, not broken and not beaten. One thought was immediately obvious even as I stood with strangers and staff in that becalmed Dixons; that someone would have to pay. America would need vengeance and someone would have to be found, blamed, bombed and defeated. What I did not predict was the brutal, reductionist manner by which America would attempt to get its catharsis, and what I could never have foreseen is that a decade later it would still be seeking closure, bestriding the world searching for the one speck of solace that will make everything as it were.

Amongst the shattered concrete and gypsum that lay where the twin towers had stood, America and, by proxy, the world lost something it would not recognise the value of until it had disappeared. America’s identity; torn asunder by a few terrorists and their own airplanes. In its place was an aesthetic of terrorism that was to infiltrate, then dominate America’s culture emperors, Hollywood. Disaster didn’t look like it was meant to, it was filthy and messy, paper floated down from on high, the haunting, ceaseless beeping of emergency distress signals echoed through otherwise silent streets and the dust, the terrible, choking, all consuming dust filled the air. It rushed in clouds down New York’s streets, propelled by the collapsing Towers and plunging what was once vibrant and busy, into a monotonous, grey pall. Firemen emerged as new heroes of a new age. Men used to running into burning buildings had their unwanted Everest, not just a burning building now but a burning symbol, an edifice of America’s creation and someone else’s destruction. Whilst their president hid underground, their fireman marched into the heart of the disaster doing whatever they could, rescuing whoever they could in the forlorn hope that it would somehow be enough to undo what had been done to their city, their country.

A new wave of patriotism swept an already patriotic nation. America’s new heroes, their firemen, raised a flag over ground zero in an abject copy of glories past and America followed suit. Flags emerged everywhere, “United We Stand” they bellowed, affirming to themselves as much as the rest of the world, and their leader emerged from his cave brandishing a new rhetoric dividing the world into those on America’s side, and the terrorists. In the days following the event it was a useful ideal, and prompted small acts of bravery or goodwill that defined America’s reaction. Lines of people queued up to give blood, traders on the stock exchange deliberately bought and bought high to stave off a terrorism induced crash. A nation tried to rebuild is self confidence and shake itself free of its worry and confusion. A new found seriousness led to the cancellation of sporting events and the quiet dropping of celebrity gossip pages but it could not and did not last. Sports returned emblazoned in flags and draped with patriotic figures from the armed forces and emergency services. America questioned itself, Newsweek pondered aloud “Why do they hate us?” But its answers were symptomatic of a country that didn’t know what it stood for anymore; maybe it was America’s freedom, maybe its democracy, maybe its religion. America didn’t know what it stood for so it stood for everything. The situation lent itself to sweeping statements and grand affirmations of a new age from philosophers and reporters alike. Even the most prosaic of tabloid hack became conversant in the Clash of Civilisations theory as the world tried to define a new epoch. The attacks were transmogrified into an assault on the entire history of liberal democracy by a culture ill suited to anything but violence and authoritarianism. Fukuyama was brought to account for proclaiming the End of History, as if his complacency had allowed the new threat to arise. While its people reeled from the assault on its own territory, America’s leaders plotted. This opportunity was not to be missed and a new world order was to be unleashed. A world order built on an incorrigible faith in the converting power of democracy and an absurdist, cowboy lexicon that allowed no linguistic quarter to the nuanced, the fearful or the unconvinced.

America declared war on an abstract noun, a bravura moment for a nation that had lost previous encounters with Crime and Drugs, but the War on Terror would be different, it had an immediate, defined and palpably conquerable enemy, the first of an expected many. On September 11th itself, Bush had promised there would be “no distinction between terrorists and those that harboured them”. He was true to his word and in this black and white world Afghanistan’s Taliban regime was to find itself an enemy not just of America but of the West in the form of NATO. As would become typical of American foreign policy, the War in Afghanistan lacked definition and purpose. The War on Terror was to be a war without end, and as such it could not have goals or ambitions, only targets. Afghanistan became its first target and the War on Terror would consume it whole, deleting its diplomatic history with America and revising its bloody, poisonous past. America would become the War on Terror. What it wanted, what it needed was what America wanted and needed. It became more important that freedom, democracy, religion or any of the other proposed complaints of America’s enemies. Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance were once criminals, warlords, and murderers but became friends and allies as the battle for liberty and democracy took immediate comfort in the arms of some of its fiercest abusers.

Whilst abroad the War on Terror was wrathful and angry, at home it was fearful and scared. America had been attacked by people living within its own borders; its own infrastructure had been turned against itself. America could not understand the reasons for its attack so it could not distinguish between future attackers and true patriots. Everywhere it looked it saw more people plotting, more people waiting for an opportunity to strike. They may have been patriotic times but America could no longer trust itself and the War on Terror wanted to feed on this paranoia. Patriotic times would get their Patriot Act. Not a law, but an attack on its own people. Fear was encouraged, conversations were taped, neighbours referred neighbours to the FBI, and the War on Terror feasted on the rotting bonds of community that had once held a nation together. Suspicion breeds suspicion, paranoia breeds paranoia, new alarms were raised and dismissed, terror levels were heightened, and silence became foreboding. The lack of attacks became proof that it was working, not that it was unnecessary, and the feeding continued. The War on Terror was so hungry, it had fed on Afghanistan, it was feeding on America but now it needed to feed on people.

The War on Terror needed victims. Not just any people, the War on Terror needed victims on which it could enact its retribution, it needed to make people suffer, and it needed its enemies to be worth less than the American citizens that were killed. It needed victims it could humiliate, interrogate, rendition and torture. The combatants who were captured in this new kind of war were not to be termed soldiers and were not granted a soldier’s rights. Instead, a new definition was created, allowing the normal rules of war to be subverted and outright ignored. The War on Terror’s victims became trapped in a quantum superposition, inmates but not prisoners, combatants but not soldiers, held in a jail without a trial or a sentence, they were to be forgotten. Existing but not existing, in America but not in America, humans but without rights, they were Schrödinger’s prisoners trapped in a legalistic maze that had somehow robbed them of their self evident truths. Guantanamo Bay became America’s iron hand in its velvet glove, the images of wire fences, and orange boiler suits were the ever present threat to its enemies. Stories of waterboarding, stress positions and sleep deprivation were the tacit warning to all that America had succumbed to its anger. With policies like these the war could not be about freedom and encouraging democracy anymore, the sheer level of force brought to bear against a country with no ability to retaliate meant it could not be viewed as a simple man hunt, rather this was the first skirmish of a new age of global war. The West bringing the full power of its military might to enforce their long held belief that democracy was the end stage of civilisation, the inevitable product of the evolution of the state. Where once this belief was held on paper and expected to take its course, now it would be forced by arms and conflict. The people would be made to be free, they would be bombed for peace, and democracy was to be enforced. The War on Terror’s latest victim was the humble oxymoron, an innocent victim abused beyond all recognition in the service of other goals.

As America reshaped its world into two defined camps, friends and enemies, the dividing line between the two became murkier and murkier. While the mass murderers and war criminals of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance had become clearly marked friends, NATO members France and Germany would slide towards the enemies camp as the War on Terror’s attention turned to its next target. America was thirsty for more vengeance and eager to expand its narrative of Western liberal democracy staring down the terrors of the world’s most notorious nations. The rhetoric became ever more bald and divisive. The Axis of Evil was termed, implying a bond of brotherhood existed between three states who had at one time or another fallen under America’s gaze but survived. Suddenly whole parts of the world were embroiled in an imagined international conspiracy to attack America fuelled by a pathological hatred of all that America was and all that it stood for. America’s self confidence had dissolved, where once it had known that it was loved, now it knew it was hated. Worse this new Axis had access to devastating weapons, America imagined these weapons only existed for one purpose, missiles, bombs, and vials primed and aimed at her heart. While America had been hurt by planes, now it feared nuclear bombs and anthrax. The War on Terror knew what it must do, they had to be disarmed. The Weapon of Mass Destruction was added to the new lexicon of war mongering. It may have been a pretence, an excuse or a reason, maybe all three to different actors in the White House theatre but its power to possess the debate was as awesome as its destructive threat. The cowboy and his posse convened at the ranch and cooked up a new meal for the War on Terror. The time for settling old scores had come to pass. Lines were drawn, resolutions requested, gained or denied, speeches were made and protests were marched but there could be no stopping the War on Terror gaining its new front. It was hungry, having only partially digested its last meal it needed the sustenance of another fallen regime, more images of American superiority, and the satisfaction of completing a job half done a decade before. Iraq and the Bushes; the new love that dare not speak its name. While the War on Terror prepared its feast, some convinced themselves that only good could come of it. The suffering of That Day would be turned to hope, it would derive meaning and no longer be simply cold blooded slaughter, troops would be welcomed into Iraq, democracy would flower and the Middle East would recognise what should become its natural state. With hindsight it is hard to know if they were lying or genuinely mistaken but whatever was found in Iraq there were neither WMD, nor any peace. Only the next quagmire in which American military might would lose its lustre.

Saddam’s information minister reminded the world that it was not only the West that could abuse language with his increasingly desperate and hysterical statements lending an element of farce to what was becoming a tragedy. When the statues fell and Baghdad was looted no one was quite sure what would happen next, it seemed not even the War on Terror knew what it wanted anymore. WMDs had been not so quietly dropped, the mission was declared accomplished and Regime Change became the new hip phrase. In the void where a plan was once assuredly place, a new manhunt was rustled up. Men who had tortured, maimed, gassed and killed were reduced to hiding in holes as America’s enforcers roamed the Wild East, lasso in hand. Finally the Ace of Aces was caught, examined, and presented to a whooping audience. Paul Bremer could not resist lowering the moment to the tone of the times. “Ladies and Gentlemen, we got ‘im,” he remarked, verbally dumping the outlaw on the floor of his saloon. They were the words of an America asserting itself once again. They had conquered the West and now they would conquer the Middle East, this was the swaggering arrogance they had missed since That Day. One of America’s longest standing bad guys had been usurped, hounded, captured and humiliated. Now he would be thrown to the Iraqis to do with as they pleased. America; the righter of wrongs, the superman it had come to believe itself to be. But then the turn happened, the conquered refused to accept the facts. They had been defeated, routed, reduced but still they came with new weapons, not the WMD as was so feared but the IED. The bomb that could be anything and anywhere, the bomb that made even the most humble car, and the quietest street untrustworthy. A device that, in its simplicity, destroyed the relationship between occupier and occupied. America was fearful again. It had not meant to be this way. America was to be loved, feared and respected in that order. These new weapons made a mockery of their massive military spending and state of the art equipment, but what really hurt was that again America was bogged down, trapped under the weight of its commitments. This America was no superman; it saw itself reflected in a new Batman. A violent, fearful character determined to use the power of its own fear against its enemies, driven by spite and discontent to try and make a better world but spurned by those it thought would support it.

Stay the Course was the new logic, if America could just hold out long enough, just keep doing what it was doing then the world would recognise, then they’d see. But staying the course was tiring and debilitating, America was stuck, drenched in blood and unable to move forward or back. Stay the Course had been a choice, now it became an inevitability. What was America now? It was no longer the fireman leaping heroically into burning builders because it was too stretched to act, it had failed to be the world’s marshal by letting its biggest fish squirm off the hook, Iraq had rejected its role of as the bringer of peace and democracy and the world had rejected it as the moral torch in a murky world. The War on Terror had consumed all before it, people, countries, ideals and money but it had left nothing in its place. America was a lover spurned. Used, abused and discarded by a War that still wanted to be fed. Everywhere the West’s ideals were in tatters. From the feeble hearted opposition to Iraq, to complicity in extraordinary rendition and torture, the West was disrobed and revealed. It had sold its most precious possessions, its values and freedoms for the tiniest crumbs of comfort and security and was left with nothing to protect. Worse was to come.

Perhaps there should have been an air of inevitability, there was no other box left to tick, but instead the shock was palpable. America’s disastrous decade was to culminate in a home brewed economic collapse almost without equal. No buildings fell but companies came crashing down, hasty mergers were arranged which only served to pass on the mess and soon the debacle spread. Vast swathes of the world were plunged into full scale recession and mass unemployment. This would be how the world would truly end. Not in the fall of buildings and the wave of dust clouds but with repossessions, resignations and stock market boards covered in red. The West tried to stop the bleeding by jamming wounds with money, thrusting more and more in. The printed all they dared, they spent all they could afford but it was not enough, they desperately sought cash from outside. Their joy when it came was tempered by regret at whose kindness they had to appreciate. Communist Dollars dyed red from China, and petrodollars seeping with oil from the Middle East flooded into a market hungry for cash and starved of credit. America and the West were beholden to the nations they had mocked. Democracies went to autocracies with their begging bowls, the evolved state seeking help from those once deemed backward. The Civilisations were no longer clashing, they were banking.

America was lost and needed a new message and it was delivered. The message was Change, its power was awesome and its range was infinite. New dawns were declared and hopes were raised but no rain came. Instead the long desert days continued. America continued to bleed, continued to stagger and teeter toward a new precipice. The Tea Party tried to remodel America again. This time as a nation of winners, struck low by a generation of losers. In the midst of the continuing crisis America’s bête noire was shot twice and killed by a member of Navy Seal Team Six. “For God and Country” he had radioed his superiors as the villain of the piece slumped to the floor. America waited for the inevitable wave of catharsis, and waited and waited. Somehow it didn’t seem to matter as much as they’d hoped. America had long ago cast off its identity as avenger of wrongs, no longer did it desire to dispense globe spanning justice, now it just wanted to pay the bills. As the decade since That Day reached its conclusion America gazed into a financial abyss as its debt ceiling loomed, and while one crisis was averted, barely, it still cost their prized credit rating.

The War on Terror ate America from the inside out. As the 10th anniversary of That Day approaches, Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay stays open, and its detained non-soldiers stay outside the law. Imprisoned by a linguistic twist that shows all America has done to its ideals and values to feed its insatiable desire for vengeance, only to discover that there are greater demons out there. The war in Afghanistan has appeared to finally outlast the war in Iraq in their private contest. The Patriot act remains in law and has been extended by the man who would be Hope. A decade ago, America’s greatness was unquestioned, now even its credit is challenged. America and the West turned the world upside down, they made the worst kind of allies, restricted freedom at home, ran roughshod over basic human rights abroad, and bled themselves dry on wars in the Middle East all because of a single event and a subsequent idea. Maybe the sickness I felt on That Day was a precognition that whatever was to come would be worse than what had happened. The War on Terror has eaten so much, destroyed so much, and used so much. Its left us all sick, and all complicit, in an era that has been defined by Terror but not the terror imposed by others but the terror the West generated in itself.