Five years

Five years ago now, I was watching an episode of The West WIng, and channel surfing in the ads, as is my wont and my family's despair, when I happened on a news flash that there was a fire in the World Trade Center. I had visited New York six weeks earlier and stood at the base of those enormous edificies, so tall that from the plane as it approached they were the only thing that looked three dimensional. I put Martin Sheen's presidency out of my mind as horrified I saw a plane appear on the TV screen and hit the second tower. At 4am my wife came out to tell me off for staying up so late. All I could do was motion her to the TV images, as the first tower came down. Hours later we were still awake watching one of the most awful things we had ever seen.

My thoughts went to my friends in New York, who worked near the WTC. One of them, Paul Gans, a physics professor at NYU, put up on Usenet a narrative of what was happening. Matt Silberstein, who I had stayed with in Brooklyn, used to get a coffee at the base of the WTC at about 9am on the way to work, and walk from there. I heard nothing of him for three days, a time of agony of worry. All I knew was what Paul wrote.

That day I went to work, sleepless, and as I arrived I met an American woman working at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research where I worked. I asked her how she was, and she broke into tears, and I felt neither embarrassed nor unaffected. I wanted to cry myself. Every person I met that day was an American in their hearts. Across the world, we were all Americans.

I supported the subsequent military action against Aghanistan, a rogue state that actively gave aid and a base for this terrible action, and supported my own country's involvement in that action. But piece by piece the support people felt for America and the allies faltered, as they shifted from direct action against people and states, to an amorphous war on an abstract concept, "terrorism", and invaded a country completely unconnected with that terrorist act, for no better reason than that nation had thwarted the current president's daddy.

And worse, they left the situation in Afghanistan half dealt with. Not only were we now in a war in a country from which we had no exit strategy, no reason to be there, and no way to quell what was always going to be a civil war, we hadn't even solved the problem of the terrorists. We were not Americans now, we were America's administration's bootblacks. The Saudi government was not chastised for having permitted their citizens to actively fund this evil, nor was Egypt. And the lies, the lies...

Last night Path to 9/11 was shown on TV, trying to rewrite history to make the previous administration the villain for all these ills. It is worthy of the best Stalinist revisionism. By rewriting history we can now say we were always at war with Oceania...

This denigrates the real loss, the real problems, the sacrifices of those who died both in the attacks and in the subsequent actions. It is the most awful propaganda, and done for one reason - to make the present government seem to be the only salvation. Thus do tyrants justify themselves.

So much was lost with the failures of the present U.S. government. So much good will, so many opportunities, so much faith. I was and remain appalled at what New York suffered. I am also appalled at the loss of civil society that that event permitted these would-be dictators to perpetrate.