Fear and Fragility Sound a Wake-Up Call

There is no getting around the fundamental reality: The destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City and the attack on the Pentagon are a huge defeat for the United States. They represent an intelligence failure of colossal proportions and the profoundest miscalculation of the threat not just to U.S. interests but to U.S. lives that terrorism represents.

Sen. Charles Hagel (R-Neb.) was doubtless right when he said that the attacks were “this generation’s Pearl Harbor.” But the problem is that it was an act of war by an enemy whom we will have difficulty identifying, let alone striking back at.

The price in lives and in the inevitable disruption of the global economy that the terrorists have extorted is incalculable. But there are costs that we have not yet begun to calculate, let alone begun to pay. With the destruction of the World Trade Center, and the vulnerability that this destruction revealed, modernity itself has been gravely wounded. It is the revenge of those for whom modernity has, rightly or wrongly, seemed like a curse.

For Americans, though, the worst may be yet to come. Welcome to the face of war in the new millennium. We lost 58,000 dead in more than a decade of fighting in Vietnam. Now, in one morning, terrorists have succeeded in mounting an attack in which the casualties will almost certainly be in the thousands.

We thought we knew about terrorism. After the plane hijackings of 1970s, the attacks on U.S. military installations and embassies in the 1980s and ‘90s and the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center itself, there seemed nothing that could surprise us. It was part of our psychological landscape and even the landscape of how we entertained ourselves. Think of those endless Hollywood movies about terrorists blowing up buildings, hijacking airplanes or unleashing deadly plagues.

But reality is not a movie and we were not prepared to wake up to see a sleek jetliner banking above the New York skyline, that most familiar of all backdrops to America’s financial and cultural power, and smashing the World Trade Center to bits.

How wrongheaded our sense of what the future held for us, as Americans, turns out to have been. That is the real success of the terrorists, and it is pointless to pretend otherwise. It is a success that is being celebrated by angry, disenfranchised people throughout the Islamic world, and not only the Islamic world.

And it has exposed not just the fragility of our buildings and the weakness of our defenses but also the mortality of our society. In this sense, the attacks are both a wake-up call and a reality check. Instead of the next big thing being some new technological innovation or medical breakthrough, the next big thing is likely to be fear.

That fear is already on display. In the wake of the attacks, the United States did not just mourn; it shut down. Whether it was evacuating downtown L.A. high-rises, 2,600 miles away from the sites of the attacks, or the cancellation of such popular entertainments as the Emmys and baseball games, it was clear just how vulnerable we suddenly felt.

And who can blame us? What the attacks bring home in a country where the passions of the rest of the world seem far away and abstract is that there is no shelter from the chaos of the Middle East or Afghanistan or sub-Saharan Africa.

America may not be obsessed by the rest of the world, but the rest of the world is obsessed with America. More than not, that obsession expresses itself in the desire to consume U.S. popular culture or, indeed, to emigrate to the United States. But in many countries, the United States is viewed as the source of everything that is wrong; and the thirst is for revenge. It is that chaotic, angry world in which we will be living in the 21st century.