sister who died in the attack.
Picture/Reuters
11.09.2002
12.10pm - By RUPERT CORNWELL in WASHINGTON
If the weather forecasters are right, it promises to be another crisp and luminous autumn morning on the American east coast,
just like that morning a year ago, when those four hijacked aircraft swept from an impossibly blue sky to kill 3,000 people and
transform America and the world.
Some have argued that nothing has really changed. But those who doubt this proposition should consider this anniversary of
September 11, a date that alone has become global shorthand for horror until then beyond human imagination, when that
everyday tool of civilisation, the ordinary commercial jetliner, was turned against civilisation itself.
Today, of course, we pray nothing will happen. And if anything is attempted, at least precautions will be in hand. Although the
FBI warnings have been, in the jargon, "non-specific", for the first time the colour-coded alert system created in March has been
raised to orange. On that dreadful day 12 months ago, the fighter aircraft were too few and too late. Today they patrol the skies
over Washington and New York. And yet fear is in the air.
A year on, that remains the greatest change, greater even than the huge hole in lower Manhattan where the World Trade Centre
once stood, greater than the destruction of the Taleban regime. Greater even than the revelation of overwhelming American
might, is America's realisation of its vulnerability.
This was the blessed land, separated from the world by oceans, watching with detachment the rest of the world that it never
really needed to understand. International terrorism was for other people. Individual Americans might suffer from it, but only if
they were "over there". Such complacency is gone, for ever.
Today Americans and the world remember September 11 2001. They will bow their heads in memory of unforgettable barbarity.
But they will also remember individual and collective acts of bravery and generosity, by firefighters and police officers, as well as
ordinary passengers aboard one of the planes who turned on their kidnappers, sacrificing their own lives to save the Capitol or
the White House, and very probably hundreds of lives.
Will it be mawkish and overdone? Perhaps, at least for we world-weary Europeans. We will smile our condescending smiles at
the dispensing of grief counselling, the endless public yearning for "closure".
As always, American sentimentality and patriotism are inviting targets for scorn, never more so than at a moment when American
suffering seems to have metamorphosed into American hubris. Some of our sympathy has gone, and with it our ability to
understand.
I was in Washington, not New York, and thus spared the real cataclysm. By comparison, we were lucky, suffering "only" 184
dead when American Airlines flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon ? though that would have been the worst terrorist disaster in
American history, had not two other planes struck the World Trade Centre less than an hour before.
But come this morning, beneath another brilliant blue sky, and those jumbled memories of panic and confusion will return ? when
a great cloud of smoke from the Pentagon billowed over the Potomac, when there were rumours of explosions by the Capitol, at
the State Department, when the world's neo-imperial capital was reduced to chaos, its basic communications networks not
functioning, its streets jammed with cars and terrified people seeking only escape, to make sure their children were safe.
As they fled, the President of the mightiest country in the world was himself jumping ignominiously from one Air Force base to
another, at the orders of a secret service that, like the rest of us, had not the faintest idea whether, or how many, other rogue
planes were loose in the American skies. For a short while that morning apocalypse seemed at hand. Then by early afternoon, a
city shut down ? its bars, shops, offices and restaurants closed, with just a few empty taxis roaming the empty streets.
Twelve months on, life's outward rhythms have resumed. They have to. People buy houses here, send their children to school.
The charred gash torn by flight AA77 in the Pentagon's south-west facade has been repaired. Americans are still the friendliest
people on earth, the readiest to return a smile. In that sense innocence has not been lost.
But whether you live in Washington or New York, you notice the change. After the destruction of its two most visible symbols,
North America's greatest metropolis wonders: what next? In the capital, a double oppression hangs in the air. Part is the certainty
that Washington is surely the preferred target for the next terrorist attack. And you are also aware that even as one "war" against
an abstract noun grinds on with no victory in sight, another war approaches. This one admittedly is against a country with a
name, identifiable on a map of the Middle East ? but of equally unpredictable consequence, and whose rationale no one has
properly explained.
This new war, moreover, if it comes, will have been hastened by the patriotism that 11 September also unleashed. Each of the
multitude of Stars and Stripes that will surely flutter again today on houses in my Washington neighbourhood will make it a little
easier for President Bush to topple Saddam Hussein by force.
