No special sign, or warnings, greet the traveller who seeks to visit the site of the World Trade Centre twin towers, destroyed in the epochal minutes of 11 September 2001. New Yorkers suggest taking the subway to Chambers Street station in Manhattan, and then walking a few blocks, and this is what I do. Nothing marks the approaches to the site except one lone street-vendor, who turns out to be from Cameroon, selling twin-tower key rings, New York fire department T-shirts and a photographic album of the events from which all human victims are removed.
Turning the corner into Cortlandt St you run up against a large empty space, surrounded by a wire fence, within its sixteen acres little movement can be seen: in effect, a building-site where, from now to 2009, a new Freedom Tower and other smaller buildings are to be erected. Around the site apparent normality prevails: a temporary Port Authority train station was rapidly rebuilt; St Paul's Chapel, where George Washington used to pray when New York was the United States capital, and where the fire-fighters and victims took refuge and rest on the day stands unperturbed; hotels, cafes and offices continue as normal. No souvenirs, no plaques, as yet no memorial.
This apparent calm also applies to New York as a whole. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 there were fears that businesses and residents would leave the city. Within a year or so, however, trends that had been in train before 9/11 began to reassert themselves: crime continued to fall, tourists came in increasing numbers, Broadway theatre enjoyed a boom, it was even said that New Yorkers were more polite to each other, and took more time to express interest in their neighbours. The same reassuring corrective applies to the world economy, another potential target of the attack on New York: it has, however, continued to grow strongly and has been apparently totally immune to increased security and transport concerns. The US airline industry was hit by 9/11 but it was already ailing.
History has a way of reducing, even banalising, the places where world conflagrations begin and other major political events occur. The Sarajevo street where the Serbian nationalist assassin Gavrilo Princip killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914, has now had its name changed from Princip to Ovala Street, and been divested of the museum erected by Serbian nationalists and the replica of the assassin's footsteps they venerated (though a small plaque remains); the Danzig (Gdansk) peninsula site where Hitler's forces attacked a Polish guard-post at dawn on 1 September 1939 has only a small museum, and some conserved ruined buildings; the traces of the Berlin wall are almost gone from the streets of Berlin and Checkpoint Charlie is marked, again, only by a modest museum.
In the case of New York in effect, the launch of the third world war the historical significance of the site, and of the events themselves, is still disputed. Those who minimise the impact of what happened point out that Islamist transnational violence kills fewer people than car accidents, or Aids, or lung cancer; and that the number of major armed operations by its agents in western cities at least has been relatively low. But as the fifth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, another argument can be made: that the "two hours that shook the world" was indeed a turning-point in modern international history, unleashing processes that have yet far from run their course.
That this is not reflected in the site as it now is may be trivial. That it is not going to be represented in the memorial and establishment US discussion of the events that are set to prevail in years to come is much more serious. For the distortion in the way 9/11 has been represented, and in the reactions it has occasioned, do not lie in alarmist exaggeration of this event, but in the abject failure of politicians and other leaders of opinion in the United States to understand the causes, and hence consequences, of the al-Qaida attack.
Fred Halliday is Professor of International Relations at the LSE, and Visiting Professor at CIDOB, Barcelona. His books include Islam and the Myth of Confrontation (IB Tauris, 2003) and 100 Myths About the Middle East
(Saqi, 2005).
Fred Halliday's "global politics" column on openDemocracy surveys the national histories, geopolitical currents, and dominant ideas across the world. The articles include:
"America and Arabia after Saddam"
(May 2004)
"Terrorism and world politics: conditions and prospects"
(March 2005)
"An encounter with Mr X" (March 2005)
"Iran's revolutionary spasm" (July 2005)
"Political killing in the cold war" (August 2005)
"Maxime Rodinson: in praise of a 'marginal man'"
(September 2005)
"A transnational umma: myth or reality? " (October 2005)
"The 'Barcelona process': ten years on" (November 2005)
"The United Nations vs the United States" (January 2006)
"Blasphemy and power" (February 2006)
"Iran vs the United States again" (February 2006)
"Terrorism and delusion" (April 2006)
"The forward march of women halted?"
(May 2006)
The casualties of memory
There are three clear pieces of evidence for the claim that 9/11 has had a major long-term impact on the world.
First, it produced a huge change in US public opinion: a strengthening of nationalism and assertive patriotism, a massive increase in the public's sense of insecurity, a greater suspicion towards people "of middle-eastern appearance", a more overt hostility towards Arabs and Muslims. Such sentiments were prominent in the large-scale and ill-informed protests about a Dubai-based company acquiring interests in US port terminal operations, including New York. The political, and intellectual, climate in the US, already moving in that direction, has shifted decisively to the right.
This has facilitated the second major change: in United States foreign policy. We know enough from the large literature on the subject that the neo-conservative lobby, festering and fretting through their exile from power in the 1990s, were keen to promote a more aggressive foreign policy, and, in particular, to confront and attack both Iraq and Iran. Bush's dubious election victory in 2000 and the undecided nature of US public opinion made that impossible to achieve initially: but 9/11 changed the calculations, providing support for the attack on Afghanistan but also offering pretext for the invasion of Iraq that followed. Anyone who doubts the impact of 9/11 need look no further than the war civil, nationalist and international now raging in Iraq, and which could yet have enormous consequences for the middle east as a whole.
Third, 9/11 has produced a major shift in the US's relations with the rest of the world, not just in Europe or the middle east. There is less support or sympathy for the US across the globe now than at any time since the Vietnam war era; while those opposed to US power from China, Iran and Russia to the new populist presidents of Latin America feel emboldened by and seek to take advantage of Washington's distraction in Mesopotamia.
It is all the more grave, therefore, that the nature of these changes, and the reasons for the 9/11 attack in the first place, should be so little recognised at the place of their initial explosion: Ground Zero. What has happened here is instead, a massive and successful denial of the international dimensions of this event, in the name of a simplistic and factional patriotism that is designed to prevent serious discussion of the event. The rebuilding plans for the site have themselves been the subject of controversy: the New York Port Authority, the public body which owns the site itself, has been in conflict with the developer, Larry Silverstein, who owns the commercial rental, i.e. office, rights to the site.
Here, as ever in this area, money has prevailed over social and urban requirements. The whole World Trade Centre itself was a political showpiece, conceived by then governor Nelson Rockefeller as a way of trying to rejuvenate that part of the island, and its construction involved the elimination of the Old Washington Market that had long been held in that area. Silverstein himself is not a major New York developer, but has pledged to restore some of the 10 million square feet of office space lost on 9/11 (starting with the first rebuilt skyscraper, opened on 23 May 2006), even though there is already a glut of such space in Lower Manhattan.
The World Trade Center prior to 9/11 relied on large amounts of leasing to public-sector bodies as a way of remaining occupied, and the same will probably occur again. Indeed the involvement of official bodies in the Memorial Foundation set up to raise the $500 million needed to pay for it has meant that public subscription has been low, and that no significant contributions have been made in the early months of 2006.
An immediate casualty has been the original design for the rebuilt tower, by Daniel Libeskind, who also built the Jewish Museum in Berlin. But of more long-term, and political, import have been two disputes about the nature of the memorial and of the museum that will be constructed on the site. The memorial was to list the names of all the approximately 2,749 who died in the coordinated attacks office workers, visitors, firefighters, airline passengers. But the New York fire department, which has loudly affirmed the heroic nature of its members on that day carrying the implication that their members were somehow more worthy of honour the passive office-workers of the two towers wanted to have the names of their members indicated by a special sign on the memorial. The families of the other victims have objected to that.
America versus the world
More serious has been the dispute over the contents of the museum. The original group set up to design the museum, and to meet the requirement it relate to issues of human freedom, sought to include in it mention of comparative historical experiences involving infringement of liberty and rights: the 1960s civil-rights movement, the Soviet gulag, and Abu Ghraib prison. This provoked an outburst from one of the family members involved, Debra Burlingame, sister of the pilot who crashed into the Pentagon, who supported by the Take Back the Memorial group her words inspired denounced the plans in the Wall Street Journal as a "betrayal" by "ideologues".
Yet even this is a small question compared to the much larger, and (in dominant political and media discussion) suppressed one, of why it was that the al-Qaida squad attacked in the first place: the role of the United States in using and training such fundamentalists in the latter stages of the cold war, the reasons for middle-eastern hostility to US policy in the middle east, the sources of anti-American sentiment the world over. Here militaristic and nationalist bluster have prevailed.
It has become possible for the US public to face, in fictional form, the events of that day, as Paul Greengrass's film United 93 about the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, and a number of novels on the subject, make clear. But recognition stops there: the denial and myopia found at Ground Zero are, indeed, part of a much wider failure of the US's leaders and opinion-makers to take the true measure of the events of that day.
Much of the discussion in Washington has centred on whether the CIA, or FBI, could and should have foreseen this event: but, as the final report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks showed, this investigation was misconceived from the start, treating 9/11 as a criminal event, looking for "masterminds" and criminal networks, and completely ignoring the political causes and context of the attack. George W Bush's purely military response to this phenomenon, followed by the extension of the counter-terrorism campaign to encompass the wholly different case of Iraq, compounded this initial failure of analysis.
The distortion of the US response to 9/11 lies not, therefore, in some exaggeration of what occurred in lower Manhattan, Washington and Pennsylvania that September morning, but in the failure to address the US's role in helping to animate Islamist violence in the first place, and the political issues within the middle east that fuelled (and after Iraq will intensify) hostility to its policies across much of the world.
It seems certain that very little, if any, of this "un-American" information will be vouchsafed to the visitors of the World Trade Center memorial and museum in the years to come. The result is that New Yorkers, and Americans as a whole, will never learn what hit them on 11 September 2001, let alone how and why their government has made the global predicament of their country and people even more acute in the ensuing years.
