FROM 9/11 TO THE ARAB SPRING
Fouad Ajami
Wall Street Journal, September 8, 2011
The Arabic word shamata has its own power. The closest approximation to it is the Germanschadenfreude—glee at another’s misfortune. And when the Twin Towers fell 10 years ago this week, there was plenty of glee in Arab lands—a sense of wonder, bordering on pride, that a band of young Arabs had brought soot and ruin onto American soil.
The symbols of this mighty American republic—the commercial empire in New York, the military power embodied by the Pentagon—had been hit. Sweets were handed out in East Jerusalem, there were no tears shed in Cairo for the Americans, more than three decades of U.S. aid notwithstanding. Everywhere in that Arab world—among the Western-educated elite as among the Islamists—there was unmistakable satisfaction that the Americans had gotten their comeuppance.
There were sympathetic vigils in Iran—America’s most determined enemy in the region—and anti-American belligerence in the Arab countries most closely allied with the United States. This occasioned the observation of the noted historian Bernard Lewis that there were pro-American regimes with anti-American populations, and anti-American regimes with pro-American populations.
I traveled to Jeddah and Cairo in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. In the splendid homes of wealthy American-educated businessmen, in the salons of perfectly polished men and women of letters, there was no small measure of admiration for Osama bin Laden. He was the avenger, the Arabs had been at the receiving end of Western power, and now the scales were righted. “Yes, but . . . ,” said the Arab intellectual class, almost in unison. Those death pilots may have been zealous, but now the Americans know, and for the first time, what it means to be at the receiving end of power.
Very few Arabs believed that the landscape all around them—the tyrannical states, the growing poverty, the destruction of what little grace their old cities once possessed, the war across the generations between secular fathers and Islamist children—was the harvest of their own history. It was easier to believe that the Americans had willed those outcomes.
In truth, in the decade prior to 9/11, America had paid the Arab world scant attention. We had taken a holiday from history’s exertions. But the Arabs had hung onto their belief that a willful America disposed of their fate. The Arab regimes possessed their own sources of power—fearsome security apparatuses, money in the oil states, official custodians of religion who gave repression their seal of approval.
But it was more convenient to trace the trail across the ocean, to the United States. Mohammed Atta, who led the death pilots, was a child of the Egyptian middle class, a lawyer’s son, formed by the disappointments of Egypt and its inequities. But there was little of him said in Egypt. The official press looked away.
There was to be no way of getting politically conscious Arabs to accept responsibility for what had taken place on 9/11. Set aside those steeped in conspiracy who thought that these attacks were the work of Americans themselves, that thousands of Jews had not shown up at work in the Twin Towers on 9/11. The pathology that mattered was that of otherwise reasonable men and women who were glad for America’s torment. The Americans had might, but were far away. Now the terrorism, like a magnet, drew them into Arab and Muslim lands. Now they were near, and they would be entangled in the great civil war raging over the course of Arab and Muslim history.
The masters and preachers of terror had told their foot soldiers, and the great mass on the fence, that the Americans would make a run for it—as they had in Lebanon and Somalia, that they didn’t have the stomach for a fight. The Arabs barely took notice when America struck the Taliban in Kabul. What was Afghanistan to them? It was a blighted and miserable land at a safe distance.
But the American war, and the sense of righteous violation, soon hit the Arab world itself. Saddam Hussein may not have been the Arab idol he was a decade earlier, but he was still a favored son of that Arab nation, its self-appointed defender. The toppling of his regime, some 18 months or so after 9/11, had brought the war closer to the Arabs. The spectacle of the Iraqi despot flushed out of his spider hole by American soldiers was a lesson to the Arabs as to the falseness and futility of radicalism.
It is said that “the east” is a land given to long memory, that there the past is never forgotten. But a decade on, the Arab world has little to say about 9/11—at least not directly. In the course of that Arab Spring, young people in Tunisia and Egypt brought down the dreaded dictators. And in Libya, there is the thrill of liberty, delivered, in part, by Western powers. In the slaughter-grounds of Syria, the rage is not directed against foreign demons, but against the cruel rulers who have robbed that population of a chance at a decent life.
America held the line in the aftermath of 9/11. It wasn’t brilliant at everything it attempted in Arab lands. But a chance was given the Arabs to come face to face, and truly for the first time, with the harvest of their own history. Now their world is what they make of it.
(Mr. Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution
and co-chair of the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.)
AMID THE MEMORIALS, AMBIGUITY AND AMBIVALENCE
Edward Rothstein
NY Times, September 2, 2011
Has any attack in history ever been commemorated the way this one is about to be? What might we have anticipated, that morning of Sept. 11, as we watched the demonically choreographed assault unfold? What could we have imagined when New York City was covered in the ashes of the twin towers and their dead, or when a section of the Pentagon—the seemingly invulnerable core of the world’s most powerful military—was reduced to rubble? Or when we finally understood that but for the doomed bravery of several heroes, the destruction of the Capitol or the White House was assured?
Would we have conjured up anything like the “9/11 Peace Story Quilt,” now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with children’s drawings and words emphasizing the need for multicultural sensitivity? Or a book paying tribute to “Dog Heroes of September 11th”? Would we have predicted that the performance artist Karen Finley would impersonate Liza Minnelli at the West Bank Cafe for the occasion, supposedly to champion her spunky spirit (though Ms. Finley will probably be far more mischievous)? Or that a Film Forum festival would pay tribute to the N.Y.P.D. with 19 movies, some unflattering (like “Serpico”) ?…
The sheer quantity of cultural events is overwhelming; so is their scattered miscellany, a potpourri of sentiment and argument, memorialization and self-criticism, reflection and political polemic. It seems as if every cultural institution, television network and book publisher feels duty-bound to produce some sort of Sept. 11 commemoration. Is there a precedent for this almost compulsive variety show about an attack on a nation’s people?
No examples suggest themselves. And in the United States, the attack on Pearl Harbor—the only incident remotely comparable—doesn’t seem to have inspired anything similar, even though that surprise assault initiated one of the most traumatic and transformative decades in this nation’s history. Did anybody think to have children make a “peace quilt” after that attack, as a war raged?…
Like theologians after the catastrophic 18th-century Lisbon earthquake, who saw the wages of sin in the disaster, many intellectuals didn’t wait long to assert that this blowback was payback. This is why this attack is often mischaracterized as tragedy, a drama that unfolds out of the flaws or failings of its victim.
That impulse of self-blame still runs through many cultural commemorations. Indeed, because little during the past decade was an unmitigated triumph, the impulse has even grown stronger. A poll from the Pew Charitable Trust this week shows that while in September 2001, 33 percent of those asked thought United States wrongdoing might have motivated the attacks, now 43 percent hold that belief. Many of the Sept. 11 books now being published are sentimental recollections of loved ones; another hefty segment is about criticism of American policy before and after Sept. 11.
This means that memorialization, rather than simply recalling the dead, or strengthening the resolve to pursue an enemy, becomes an opportunity to push these arguments further. Disaster becomes ambiguously commemorated. Any victory is also ambiguously celebrated because it is seen as scarred by sin (though surely no victory is ever unmarred). The delays in the reconstruction at ground zero are as much a result of these tensions as anything else.
You can see the same conflicts in the White House “talking points” for Sept. 11 commemorations that The New York Times reported on this week. The memos don’t suggest any cheering for successes of the last decade; there is even a hesitation to attract much attention, as if the White House were feeling ambivalent about the whole business, haunted perhaps by guilt. The memos also minimize any suggestion that military force had something to do with Al Qaeda’s suffering severe setbacks.…
The memos almost treat Sept. 11 as if it weren’t Sept. 11. It is certainly not about Islamist extremism or the jihadist proclamations by its aspirants. It isn’t even really about us. We are told: “We honor all victims of terrorism, in every nation of the world. We honor and celebrate the resilience of individuals, families and communities on every continent, whether in New York or Nairobi, Bali or Belfast, Mumbai or Manila, or Lahore or London.” (Is it just an accident of alliteration that crucial cities torn by terror have been omitted, because that would have required acknowledging that Jerusalem or Tel Aviv faces something similar?)
Indeed, so anxious is the White House to filter out any historical aspects of Sept. 11 that it proclaims this anniversary “the third official National Day of Service and Remembrance.” It should be used to encourage “service projects” and a “spirit of unity.” Through such demonstrations, the memos affirm, our communities can withstand “whatever dangers may come—be they terrorist attacks or natural disasters.…”
As many commemoration plans suggest, though, democratic culture also finds it difficult to conceive of this kind of enmity, overlooking, like the White House memos, the fact that Islamist extremism is one of the most powerful and dangerous manifestations of such passions. And that strain is not diminishing. The Pew survey found that 21 percent of all Muslim Americans now believe there is either a fair amount or a great deal of support for extremism in their own communities.
So a Sept. 11 commemoration might well be a celebration of democratic culture’s enduring presence. It might include the wide range of what we see before us: Noam Chomsky’s fulminations (“Ten Years of Terror” at the Guggenheim Museum) and an interview with former President George W. Bush (“The 9/11 Interview,” on National Geographic television); multicultural bridge-making; and lines in the sand. But is it impossible to imagine that in the midst of concerts and quilts for peace, communications with the spirit world and varied forms of political and psychological exorcisms, there might also be a recognition of what was at stake that day, and what, to a great extent, still is?
9/11 AND THE STRUGGLE FOR MEANING
Bret Stephens
Wall Street Journal, September 6, 2011
December 7, 1951, came and went with scant ceremony. Harry Truman spent the day vacationing in Key West. Alben Barkley gave a speech in Honolulu in which he defended the war in Korea. Time magazine skipped the Pearl Harbor anniversary altogether: Its cover story that week was a lengthy profile of DeWitt and Lila Wallace. The Daily Double goes to the reader who can identify Barkley or the Wallaces without first turning to Google.
Compare that to the wall-to-wall attention being given to the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Leon Panetta will speak at the Washington National Cathedral on Friday. President Obama will speak there Sunday, after visits to the three memorial sites in Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York. The World Trade Center memorial plaza will open to the families of the victims. Smaller commemorations and remembrances will take place everywhere from Boston to Bagram.…
I live near the [Trade Center’s new] memorial and I’ve tried my best to like it, though mainly because it’s a relief no longer to have to stare into that pit in the ground. I certainly hope the families of the victims like it. But despite the impressive scale and the affecting nod to the individual dead, there’s no getting around the sense that the central element of the memorial is emptiness, a giant vacancy. The [reflecting] pools [over the former Towers’ footprints] are too deep even to offer an actual reflection, the way Washington’s reflecting pool does. Instead there is a void into which we can weep or scream or just hold still. But it gives nothing back.
I suppose there’s an argument that that’s as it should be. September 11 was nothing if not a day of loss, and this memorial cannot avoid expressing something of that loss. The problem is that it’s exclusively about loss, while 9/11 was also a day of extraordinary giving: of the first responders, the passengers on Flight 93, the people in the towers who helped each other out, the emergency crews, the volunteers. A better 9/11 tribute would reflect those deeds, not sound an echo to the nihilism that was at the core of al Qaeda’s designs.
There is, however, a deeper problem, this one not the fault of the memorial’s designers. In 1951, Americans could look back to Pearl Harbor and see its bookends in VE Day and the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri. In that light, Pearl Harbor may have been a day of infamy but it was also, for the intelligence failures and military defeat it represented, a day to live down.
The war that was begun on September 11 has no bookend. We don’t even know whether we are in the early, middle or late chapters—or whether we’re still in the same book. Perhaps that’s why dates like November 13, 2001 (the day Kabul fell to the Northern Alliance) or April 9, 2003 (when Baghdad fell to the U.S. Army) go down the memory hole. I doubt many people can recall the exact date Osama bin Laden was killed.…
There is something dangerous about this. Dangerous because we risk losing sight of what brought 9/11 about. Dangerous because nations should not send men to war in far-flung places to avenge an outrage and then decide, mid-course, that the outrage and the war are two separate things. Dangerous above all because nations define themselves through the meanings they attach to memories, and 9/11 remains, 10 years on, a memory without a settled meaning.
None of that was true in 1951. We had gone to war to avenge Pearl Harbor. We had won the war. We had been magnanimous in victory. The principal memorial that generation built was formed of the enemies they defeated, the people they saved, the world they built and the men and women they became. Our task on this 9/11 is to strive to do likewise.
MEMORIALIZING SEPTEMBER 11TH
Wilfred M. McClay
National Affairs, Fall 2011
In the run-up to the tenth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, one could predict with ease two things about the nation’s observation of that grim occasion. First, that a huge amount of journalistic attention would be paid to the terrible events of ten years ago, with lengthy and reflective feature articles in magazines and newspapers, lavish photographic spreads, television specials, colloquia and panel discussions, and editorials and opinion columns. The media might, for a time, partially lift their strange, self-imposed prohibition on displaying the horrifying imagery of the attacks. We could once again see the surreal images of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers; the resulting chaos in the streets of New York; the titanic collapse of the Trade Center buildings; the gargantuan plumes of smoke and fire rising from Manhattan; the bullhorn speeches; the heroism of firefighters, policemen, emergency medical teams, and other first responders; and the generosity and gritty determination of thousands of ordinary New Yorkers, along with the profound and inconsolable grief of many others. Some of the most horrifying sights we remember from that day, such as the desperate souls forced to plunge to their deaths out of the towers’ high windows, might still be kept off the air. But minute attention would again be paid to the human toll of the calamity, the immense scale of destruction, and the multiple facets of suffering.
The second thing of which we could be certain is that there would be comparatively little attention paid to what September 11th means, and should mean, for Americans. In fact, the finely grained depiction of the event’s wrenching human drama can, to some extent, serve to divert attention from the disturbing fact that we lack a general consensus about the event’s larger importance to our nation. That fact greatly complicates the task of national remembrance. I keep by my desk an old metal sign dating back to the 1940s, bearing the words “Remember Pearl Harbor.” No American, at least not until recently, would have had any doubt as to what those words meant. But there is reason to wonder whether any comparable clarity or universality of meaning inheres in the words “Remember 9/11.” Many, in fact, are likely to ask: What ought we even to remember?…
As powerful as September 11th proved in its immediate effects, though, the event’s influence rapidly dissipated. The flags were soon put away, and less than five years later, at the height of public anger over the Iraq War, Neil Young received a Grammy Award nomination for singing “Let’s Impeach the President.” Yet controversy over the Iraq War was not the sole reason that the 2001 attacks faded in importance. Although such things are impossible to measure with precision, there seems to have been a growing level of unease and even defensiveness and guilt about the nation’s alleged Islamophobia—sentiments that increasingly overshadowed any anxiety about the possibility of another attack. More and more Americans have been willing to take seriously the idea, peddled by figures like the literary critic Susan Sontag, University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, that America was somehow to blame for the attacks, and fully deserving of them.…
The fact that there is still so little consensus about the meaning of events so momentous and terrible, and so plainly injurious to the national life, has to be taken as an ominous sign about where we stand as a people. Much of it can be explained by the increasingly bitter and voracious character of our national politics. It has been astonishing and dismaying over the past ten years to witness the extent to which the events of September 11th, as well as our national response to them, have been absorbed almost entirely into the previously existing structure of American domestic political debates and rivalries. One might have imagined that, as had earlier been the case with the Pearl Harbor attacks, such an event would have jolted the nation into lasting unity. But one would have been wrong.
At times during these past ten years, it has seemed as if the world’s conflicts are of interest to Americans only insofar as they affect the eternal struggle between Democrats and Republicans, the only struggle that really matters. Never has the nation seemed more insular; never has it appeared more unable to imagine world events in any way other than as refracted through the ceaseless battle for political advantage on American soil, specifically in Washington.…
But there are other, complicating reasons why we find it so difficult to commemorate an event like September 11th. The whole proposition of memorializing past events and persons, particularly those whose lives and deeds are entwined with the nation-state, has been called into question by the prevailing intellectual ethos of the day, which cares little for the authority of the past and frowns on anything that smacks of hero worship or filiopietism. That ethos is epitomized in the burgeoning academic study of “memory,” a term that refers…to widely held popular understandings of the past—particularly those that revolve around the nation-state. “Memory” designates the history we all share, which is why monuments and other instruments of national commemoration are especially important in serving as expressions and embodiments of it. It is not hard to see, however, that the systematic problematizing of memory—the insistence on subjecting it to endless rounds of interrogation and suspicion, aiming precisely at the destabilization of meaning while producing endless new topics for academic seminar papers—is likely to produce impassable obstacles to the effective commemoration of the past.…
Scholars in the field examine memory with a jaundiced and highly political eye, viewing nearly all claims for tradition or for a heroic past as flimsy artifice designed to serve the interests of dominant classes and individuals, and otherwise tending to reflect the class, gender, and power relations in which those individuals are embedded. Memory, wrote historian John Gillis, has “no existence beyond our politics, our social relations, and our histories.” He added: “We have no alternative but to construct new memories as well as new identities better suited to the complexities of a post-national era.”
Although any collective entity can be subjected to this kind of deconstructive analysis, the chief target, as Gillis’s words imply, tends to be the modern nation-state, with its panoply of anthems, stories, histories, emblems, symbols, rituals, monuments, and other elements of civil religion. The modern nation-state clothes itself in all this exquisite finery, it is argued, as a way of enveloping its origins in a cloak of mystique, and manages to surround itself with an aura of reality sufficiently powerful and convincing to command the loyalties of its subjects. But its day is passing, or so scholars in the field seem universally to believe; they generally feel it incumbent upon themselves to hasten the day when it is past altogether.…
What one can say without hesitation is that this outlook—skeptical of all past constructions of history, eager to substitute “better” constructions of one’s own devising—makes the creation of new monuments and commemorations much more difficult than it ever has been before.
What solves the practical problem of creating monuments, at least in the short run, is the individualizing of the commemoration. This was precisely the tack taken by Maya Lin’s highly successful Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, a monument whose very name signaled that the purpose was to honor the individual veterans rather than their cause. As is well known, the project was highly controversial in the early stages, and prominent Vietnam veteran (and current U. S. senator) James Webb withdrew his earlier support for such a memorial, disparaging Lin’s design as a “nihilistic slab of stone.” It might have been more apt, however, to call it a collective tombstone, upon which were inscribed some 58,000 names of those individuals who lost their lives in Vietnam, but that eschewed any reference to the larger war or the nation.…
Something of the same approach is being taken by the new 9/11 memorial, located on the former site of the World Trade Center. It too features the names of victims—nearly 3,000, including those from Pennsylvania and Virginia as well as those who died in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center—in this case inscribed on bronze panels, deployed around pools with waterfalls.… But nowhere does it offer an explanation of the motives behind the “terrorist attacks” themselves, or a larger view of the geopolitical struggle of which they were a part.…
What is being commemorated here? What is the connection between the people being remembered and the larger task that their deaths set before the nation?
Lincoln’s great words at Gettysburg sought to highlight such a connection, but the new memorial seeks to obscure it. If one were talking only about the tragically lost lives of some 3,000 individuals and nothing else—as if their lives had been lost in a single giant plane crash or auto accident, or as the result of a random psychopathic act.… When a spokesman for New York mayor Michael Bloomberg explained his decision to exclude all clergy from the tenth-anniversary observance, he emphasized the mayor’s view that the service should stay focused on the families of the victims. This view is sadly, and ominously, myopic.…
At Ground Zero…ten years after the attacks, very little has actually been reconstructed. This stagnation has afflicted the greatest of American cities, which was able even in the depths of the Great Depression to raise the still-magnificent Empire State Building in less than 14 months. In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, many brave words were spoken and loud boasts were made about how the city would bounce back and rebuild the Twin Towers even higher. But a decade has now passed, and those promises ring sickeningly hollow. The specific reasons for the failure lie in a bottomless pit of excuse-making, ego-jousting, self-interestedness, and bureaucratic inertia, and it would be an immense task to compose the indictment that would identify the individuals or groups who bear the greatest responsibility. But to do so would be pointless—or rather, would miss the most important point.
That point is a simple one: The fact that so little has been restored in ten years should be a source of deep concern to all of us. It is no small thing. It is nothing less than a national disgrace that a project of such profound symbolic importance to the American people, and to the world, has remained trapped in the entrails of petty business as usual. But one thing should be clear: This is not a failure attributable in some general way to the negligence of the American people as a whole, since they are not the ones who decide such things as the disposition of Manhattan real estate or the design of monuments and memorials. It is specifically the failure of the nation’s leadership class—of its political, cultural, intellectual, legal, and business elites—and of the intersecting ways that their actions and beliefs have served to thwart a profound national need.…
But in America, a failure of the leadership class need not mean a comprehensive failure of the nation. There are always reasons to be hopeful about our country, which has a remarkable ability to renew itself. And the greatest good is often done, as William Blake put it, in “minute particulars,” in small but focused ways that individual citizens can manage on their own initiative. Such people retain the capacity to remember, and know instinctively how to keep the flame of memory alive.
My favorite keepers of the September 11th flame are the Freeport Flag Ladies, three Maine women who have for the past ten years kept a simple but profound weekly observance of the event. During their “Tuesday on the Hill,” which takes place each week on Main Street in Freeport, they hold large American flags in remembrance of the events of September 11th and in honor of the service and sacrifice of American troops. They are often joined by others, including military personnel home from Iraq or Afghanistan, or 9/11 family members. Weekly photographs of Tuesdays on the Hill are posted on their web site, along with a special message each week (which is also e-mailed to a list of military families who have signed up) written by Elaine Greene, one of the three ladies. Her message for August 16 of this year offers a sense of the tone and spirit of them all:
What shall we give you as a token
That our support for you will not be broken
We could shatter the heavens with heartfelt song
Of our deep love and gratitude that is so strong.The ladies also regularly make the two- to three-hour drive to Bangor International Airport or Pease International Airport to greet soldiers who are being deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq or are returning from deployments. They present the troops with gifts and take photos of them, which are later shared with them and their families in the form of CDs that the ladies create and mail out every week. They send special packages to combat hospitals, containing neck pillows, clothing, and reading material. In these many ways, they seek to remind the soldiers and their families that there are people in America who care about them and honor them. Their actions form a living memorial, reflecting presence rather than absence.
The Freeport Flag Ladies probably haven’t read Renan, but they fully understand his words regarding sacrifice, and the responsibilities imposed by a nation’s grief.…
They took their own steps to observe the tenth anniversary in a big way—importing a piece of steel from the World Trade Center and transforming Freeport into “9/11 Central” for all of Maine. Such keepers do not suffer from ambivalence about the meaning of September 11th, and their love and clarity are both tonic and contagious. New York, and the rest of America, need to find a way to share in their spirit.
