One day we were blissfully safe and unsuspecting. The next we were violated beyond our wildest imaginings. Although the possibility of further attacks remains a concern, whatever form they might take would surprise no one. Life cannot be the same again, but we must carry on, stronger if sadder, with renewed purpose and lasting memory.
Wladyslaw Pleszczynski, a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution in California, is the editor of a collection of new essays on the impact of September 11 called "For better and for worse," he said, "that day's attacks continue to be felt and the impact remains overstated, underestimated, is seen as unnerving, demoralizing, the staff of heroism, of cowardice, bringing out the best and worst in us."
Everyone in the United States remembers what he or she was doing on September 11. It was a Tuesday, a beautiful morning in New York City, Washington, DC and the fields of rural Pennsylvania. Then in an instant, everything changed.
The terrorist attacks carried out against the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a commercial jet, which crashed in rural Pennsylvania, marked the beginning of a new era in American history. People started to measure time as "before and after" September 11. Although this date is now engraved in our common memory, remarkably, it is still very difficult to grasp the enormity of what we call now, the "event."
That's the view of one of the contributors to Managing Editor of the magazine Roger Kimball. "There is nothing so unforeseen as an 'event'" he said. "Had I been asked, on September 10, 2001, whether New York's Twin Towers would continue standing for 'the foreseeable future,' I should have answered, 'yes. And so, in one sense, they did. Only my foresight was not penetrating enough, not farseeing enough, to accommodate that most pedestrian of eventualities: an 'event.' "
And this "event" altered us. Scholars say it changed our perception of the outside world, our sense of security, and, on a lager scale, the world's geopolitical landscape.
What makes it difficult to grasp the impact of 9-11 is that it is the first attack in a new kind of war. As Professor Daniel Pipes, Director of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum puts it, something "large and complex" happened to begin this new conflict. But our enemy remains still very much obscure. Professor Pipes said, "It's occurred to me in the last few months that we are in something large and complex, not of course nearly as large in the military sense, but many, many times more complex conceptually than World War II and we don't have that fat book yet."
Since we don't have that book, and we find ourselves in the middle of a strange and still-not understood war, all we can do, said Roger Kimball of is try to interpret this war's many sifting contradictory developments. He, like many analysts, now believes all the elements of the September 11 attack were present long before the strikes actually took place.
"Today," he said, "the events of September 11 can seem almost inevitable. Reasons have been furnished for every detail. Plausible itineraries have been repeated until they seem like predictions. All of those reasons and explanations were available on September 10. A look at the literature shows that some had been propounded for years. But they lacked the traction that events give to hindsight. They were not part of the foreseeable future until that future, unforeseen, overtook us."
To try to make some sense of what happened on September 11 from the Islamic perspective, Professor Daniel Pipes said one has to understand 1,400 years of Muslim history.
In a statement issued on October 7, the day the U.S. began its offensive against the Taliban in Afghanistan, President George W. Bush referred to the "sudden terror" that had descended on the United States just 27 days earlier.
But terrorist leader Osama bin Laden commented that same day that the Muslim world had experienced more than eighty years of "humiliation and disgrace" at the hands of the West. Twenty-seven days versus eighty years sums up the difference between a stunned American sense of broken innocence, and the brooding militant Islamic feeling of epochal betrayal.
According to Professor Pipes, this Muslim sense of betrayal translated into anger, envy, hostility, fear and political extremism. And he warns, terrorism has become the vehicle for the political extremists who sow destruction under the banner of militant Islam. He questions the popular view that a "clash of civilizations" will lead to war between the Islamic and Western worlds. The real battle, he said, is between two Islams - the militant and the moderate.