A decade of wrong decisions and damaging policies
The West’s reaction to 9/11 was excessive and misguided, wrongly influenced by hubris, hysteria and ignorance. Ten years on, we are still mired in a mess largely of our own making.
Today is 12 September, ten years and one day after the US was so grotesquely attacked by Al Qaeda; after the War on Terror began; after our world became a more explosive, more complex and curiously oversimplified place.
On 7 September 2011 I covered the Frontline Club’s First Wednesday Special: Changing world – conflict, culture and terrorism in the 21st century. A five-member panel, chaired most excellently by Paddy O’Connell, worked through the events of the last ten years and asked what we have learned and how we could have done things differently.
The day was in every sense a watershed: we now live in a post-9/11 world. We fear something as vague and unknowable as ‘terror’; we put disproportionate hope in over-egged airport security protocol and liberals-look-the-other-way racial profiling. But is our world any more peaceful than the pre-9/11 world? Are we any safer? And do we have a hope in hell of winning the impressively named but ideologically flawed War on Terror? No. We could have done something different. We should have.
Most people remember where they were that day. I was in Toronto, 340-some miles to the north, heading home from rowing practice, late-summer sun on a perfectly still morning. Our kitchen radio, tuned to the local hip-hop station, announced a plane had crashed into the World Trade Centre; misguided private pilot in a Cessna, maybe. Thirty minutes later, walking to uni, eerie streets echoing with anxious newscasters, we knew. I got to class as the second tower fell. Profs cancelled classes – “This is history. Go live it.” – and I ended up at Sunnybrook Hospital to the north of the city, waiting five hours to give blood to a yearned-for wave of survivors that never materialised.
In these ten years I have grown from a child who lived in the world she was given, few questions asked, to an adult capable of shaping that world in a meaningful way. I don’t want to be afraid of terror – tautological morass that it is – and I don’t want to live in a world that runs on an economy of fear. Our first reaction was a wrong one. We could have done something different. We should have. Now is a good time to change that.
– I covered this talk on 9/11 for the Frontline Club. My full article is on the club’s website.
