9/11

Hard to believe it was five years ago. It's informed so much of our day-to-day thinking/actions ever since.

Bruce Springsteen and 9/11
cbc.ca

In 2001, nine days after the Sept. 11 attacks destroyed New York City’s Twin Towers, George W. Bush made a momentous speech to a joint session of U.S. Congress. “Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom — the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time — now depends on us,” the president said. “Our nation — this generation — will lift a dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter and we will not fail.”

One night later, a broadcast coalition led by ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC aired America: A Tribute to Heroes, a star-spangled benefit for victims of the attacks and their families. The telethon, which raised more than $150 million US, began with a long shot of New York’s skyline that turned to Bruce Springsteen and a choir stock still on a candlelit stage. America had its ready avenger in Bush. Now the Boss channelled its hurt. “This is a prayer for our fallen brothers and sisters,” Springsteen said, introducing his song My City of Ruins.

There’s a blood-red circle
On the cold dark ground
And the rain is falling down
The church door’s thrown open
I can hear the organ’s song
But the congregation’s gone
My city of ruins
My city of ruins ...

He’d written the lyrics a year before, moved by the economic decay of his adopted hometown, Asbury Park, N.J., although he had yet to record them. With slight changes, the song became a near-perfect fit for the devastation of the Sept. 11 attacks.

During the telethon, Springsteen, accompanied by his own guitar and harmonica, sang as a man who had been bowed but not broken. His eyes seemed black and heavy. He did not (could not) raise them from his microphone through the refrain: “Come on, rise up,” repeated seven times. A call on high followed — Springsteen is a lapsed Catholic, though his catalogue teems with Christian imagery — sung in rounds with the others.

... I pray for the strength, Lord (With these hands)
I pray for the faith, Lord (With these hands)
We pray for your love, Lord (With these hands)
We pray for the lost, Lord (With these hands)
We pray for this world, Lord (With these hands) ...

Toward the end, the choir dropped away. Springsteen finished alone — softer, stronger than before. “Come on, rise up/Come on, rise up/Come on, ri-i-i-i-ise up.” It would take more than a concert to deliver America’s catharsis — the healing continues today — but My City of Ruins gave reason to believe it could happen.

Bruce Springsteen opens the live broadcast of America: A Tribute to Heroes in September 2001 with the song My City in Ruins. During the five years since 9/11, U.S. musicians of almost every kind have responded to the attacks through song. None, though, has matched Springsteen’s gift of The Rising, released in July 2002. The 15-track meditation ranks among America’s finest artistic statements on the event and its aftermath. My City of Ruins appears at the album’s close, a capstone on 72 minutes of pain, grief and redemption.

The Rising was Springsteen’s first album to be produced by someone outside his fold: Brendan O’Brien’s prior credits included work with Rage Against the Machine, Pearl Jam and Korn. The album, though, is closer to gospel than hard rock. For most of its songs, Springsteen assumes the voices of ordinary people who have been marked by loss. He sings about the emergency services and office workers who perished when the World Trade Center crumbled to earth, and the loved ones they left behind.

Days after the attacks, with the wreckage of the Twin Towers still smouldering, Springsteen took his family to church — an unusual thing for him to do. “We were in there with the rest of the wannabes, and it was jammed. But I found that to be very valuable. People just wanted to be with other people who were addressing issues of faith and hope and love,” he said to Rolling Stone in the summer of '02. That experience, coupled with an encounter with a stranger who yelled, “We need ya!” from a passing car, moved Springsteen to make The Rising. “That made me sense,” he told the magazine, “like, ‘Oh, I have a job to do.’”

Springsteen started writing two songs — they’re both on The Rising — before his appearance on the Tribute to Heroes telethon. (And then played My City of Ruins because neither was finished.) “Children are asking if it’s all right/Will you be in our arms tonight?” he asks in one, called You’re Missing. The other, Into the Fire, is penned from the perspective of a firefighter’s surviving companion: “I need your kiss, but love and duty called you someplace higher/Somewhere up the stairs into the fire.”

A delicate vocal treatment is all that keeps The Rising’s title track (and first single) from feeling as if it came from the score of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie: the countrified backbeat borders on cloying. But the Boss carries his listeners back through time and space, into the smoke-clogged stairwells of the WTC. “Can’t see nothin’ in front of me/Can’t see nothin’ coming up behind/Make my way through this darkness ... Lost track of how far I’ve gone/How far I’ve gone, how high I’ve climbed.”

(Sony Music Canada Inc.) After the Sept. 11 attacks, Springsteen supported military action against al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan — a measure that was designed, in Bush’s words, to “smoke” Osama bin Laden and his fighters “out of their caves, and get them running.” The left-leaning rocker, though, has since become an outspoken critic of the White House’s “War on Terror.”

Throughout The Rising, Springsteen offers a more complex, considered reaction to 9/11 than the Bush administration’s “dead or alive” militarism. Worlds Apart, a semi-saccharine tale of distant lovers, draws on Middle Eastern and African influences, praises “Allah’s blessed rain” and features backing vocals by a Sufi choir. And Paradise is an even greater surprise — it’s sung in the style of Into the Fire, but written in the voice of a suicide bomber who waits to die and join his soulmate in the afterlife.

I sink 'neath the water cool and clear
Drifting down, I disappear
I see you on the other side
I search for the peace in your eyes
But they’re as empty as paradise

Considering the surge in American xenophobia that followed the attacks, it’s a startling — if slightly overwrought — attempt at empathy. The Rising debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and sold more than 750,000 copies in its first two weeks. It was Springsteen’s first collection of new material since 1995, and reunited him in the recording studio with the E Street Band for the first time since 1984’s mega-selling Born in the U.S.A. That album was about Springsteen’s disaffection with Reagan-era domestic policy. The Rising is an exercise in communal healing from foreign attacks. (“Come on, rise up!”) Four years after its release, with bin Laden still at large and the War on Terror raging on, its music remains as vital now as it was then.

Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day.



FIVE YEARS ON
Economist

How George Bush fought back against al-Qaeda's assault, and what he got wrong

IT STANDS to reason that 19 men cannot change history. But they did. Five years and two American-led wars later, the world created by the September 11th hijackers is a darker place than almost anyone predicted at the start of the new century. Al-Qaeda itself may have been battered and dispersed, but the idea it stands for has spread its poison far and wide.

The essence of that idea, so far as a coherent one can be distilled from the ferment of broadcasts and fatwas issued by Osama bin Laden and his disciples, is that Islam is everywhere under attack by the infidel and that every Muslim has a duty to wage holy war, jihad, in its defence. America is deemed a special target for having trespassed on the Arab heartland. Intoxicated by their defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the jihadists are hungry to topple another superpower.

This cause had deadly adherents before the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre in 2001. Mr bin Laden issued his “Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders” in 1998, the year al-Qaeda bombed two American embassies in East Africa. But an honest tally of the record since September 11th has to conclude that the number of jihadists and their sympathisers has probably multiplied many times since then. It has multiplied, moreover, partly as a result of the way America responded.

Half-success in Afghanistan, total failure in Iraq
The first of the two wars George Bush launched after September 11th looked initially like a success, and compared with the second it still is. Al-Qaeda operated openly in Afghanistan and enjoyed the protection of its noxious Taliban regime, which refused America's request to hand Mr bin Laden over. America's invasion, one month after America itself had been attacked, therefore enjoyed broad international support.

The fighting ended swiftly and the political aftermath went as well as could be expected in a polity as tangled as Afghanistan's. By 2004 a first-ever free election had legitimated the presidency of Hamid Karzai. A ramshackle but representative parliament took office in 2005. The country is plagued by warlordism and the opium trade, and Taliban fighters are mounting a challenge in the south. But they do not yet look capable of dislodging the new government in Kabul.

Even though Mr bin Laden himself eluded America's forces in Afghanistan, the invasion deprived al-Qaeda of a haven for planning and training. This achievement, however, was cancelled out by the consequences of Mr Bush's second war: the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. There, three and a half years on, fighting and terrorism kill hundreds every month, providing the jihadists with both a banner around which to recruit and a live arena in which to sharpen their military skills.

Why has Iraq turned out so much worse than Afghanistan? Not only because of the familiar catalogue of Rumsfeldian incompetence—disbanding Iraq's army, committing too few American troops—but also because of al-Qaeda itself. Like most Sunni extremists, some in al-Qaeda regard Shia Muslims as virtual apostates. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the movement's leader in Iraq, managed before being killed last June to organise so many attacks on Shias and their holy places that after a long forbearance the Shias at last struck back, turning what had been an insurgency against the Americans and the new government into a bitter sectarian war.

Had Iraq turned out better, fewer people would have continued to complain that this war, unlike Afghanistan's, was conceived in sin. Loathsome though he was, Saddam Hussein had no link to al-Qaeda or the September 11th plot. Moreover, the pre-war claims of America and Britain that he had defied the Security Council by keeping his banned chemical and biological weapons, and continuing to seek nuclear ones, turned out to be false. In the battle for world opinion, this mistake, if such it was, had calamitous consequences.

Being unwise after the event
Mr Bush and Tony Blair tried and failed to win a clear United Nations mandate for war. By invading without one, they made themselves vulnerable to the charge that the war was unlawful. The quarrel in the Security Council widened a rift between America and Britain on one hand and France, Germany and Russia on the other. But this would have counted for much less if the weapons of mass destruction had existed. When it transpired that they did not, Muslims—and many others—began to assume that they had been just a pretext. Opinion polls show that millions of Muslims now think America's real aim in Iraq was to grab its oil, help Israel, or, just as Mr bin Laden said all along, wage war on Islam.

There were those (such as this newspaper) who supported the Iraq war solely because of the danger that a Saddam Hussein with a biological or atomic bomb would indeed have posed. But Mr Bush and Mr Blair refused after the war to be embarrassed by the absence of the weapons that had so alarmed them beforehand. They stressed instead all the other reasons why it had been a good idea to overthrow Mr Hussein. In Los Angeles last month Mr Blair argued that the invasion was all about supporting Islam's moderates against its reactionaries and bolstering democracy against dictatorship.

Such arguments no longer sell in the West, let alone the Muslim world. If it was all about dictatorship, what about the dictatorship the West continues to embrace in Saudi Arabia, and the quasi-dictatorship in Pakistan? If it was about helping Islam's moderates against its reactionaries, what is so clever about stepping in to someone else's civil war?

Besides, the horrors of pre-invasion Iraq had nothing to do with Islam's inner demons. Mr Hussein's was a secular dictatorship in which Islamists of all stripes kept their heads down. It is true, and it is commendable, that once America and Britain had toppled Mr Hussein, they helped to organise free elections. They are right to support Iraq's new government and to make the argument for democracy elsewhere in the Arab world. But portraying the whole enterprise as if it had from the start been all about an experiment in democracy just makes Muslims crosser. By what right do you invade someone else's country in order to impose a pattern of government?

Whatever else it may become, Iraq has so far been an own-goal in the battle for hearts and minds—and not just Muslim minds. The West rallied behind America five years ago. Now it is split: poll after poll shows deep distrust among America's traditional allies, distrust that makes co-operation on everything from nuclear proliferation to trade far harder. Some of this can be put down to the usual anti-Americanism, and the European politicians who have pandered to it. But Mr Bush has played, unerringly, straight into anti-Americans' hands.

One vast mistake has been his neglect of Mr Blair's advice to push seriously for the creation of a Palestinian state, instead of just saying that this was his “vision”. But worse has been his administration's wanton disregard for civil liberties. Some curtailing of freedoms was inevitable. Yet Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, the torture memos and extraordinary rendition have not just been unAmerican and morally wrong but also hugely counter-productive. In a battle that is largely about ideas, America seems to many to have abandoned the moral high ground and so won more recruits for the jihadists.

Your people, our people
Still, not everything has gone al-Qaeda's way either. For if, as that ferment of fatwas suggests, Mr bin Laden's longer-term aim was to topple the pro-American regimes in the Muslim world, and so establish a new caliphate, he has failed.

Of the 19 hijackers, 15 were Saudis, as is Mr bin Laden himself. Before 2003 al-Qaeda had not attacked the Saudi regime. However, in May of that year, just after America invaded Iraq, the organisation launched an offensive at home. Suicide-bombers attacked a housing compound in Riyadh, starting a campaign of terrorist violence that has claimed some 200 lives. Yet the regime is still standing, and so far as anyone can tell the violence has served mainly to strengthen it.

Another prize to have eluded al-Qaeda is Pakistan. Like Saudi Arabia, this is a country where Islam is central to the state's idea of itself. It is undoubtedly unstable. Pakistan teems with al-Qaeda sympathisers and other jihadists training for operations in Kashmir and beyond. Mr bin Laden himself is probably hiding there. Nonetheless, all of al-Qaeda's efforts to kill President Pervez Musharraf, or to deflect Pakistan from an American alliance that has grown steadily closer since September 11th, have so far come to naught.

As in the 1990s, when jihadists have mounted a violent challenge to the authoritarian states of the Muslim world they have been defeated. This is not only because such states possess strong instruments of repression. It is also because the jihadists' grandiose aims and gruesome methods have prevented them from turning a resentment of America into an appetite for revolution at home. It has not escaped the notice of Iraq's neighbours that most of the victims of al-Qaeda there have been fellow Muslims. Jihad in the abstract, or far away, may be all very well. But attacks inside countries such as Indonesia, Turkey and Jordan, where the victims were mainly Muslim, have turned local people away from al-Qaeda's cause.

If anything, that cause may have fared better in the West itself, among those whose identity as Muslims has come to take precedence over loyalty to the host country. On July 7th last year four very ordinary British-born Muslims blew themselves up on the London underground, leaving behind martyrdom tapes making it clear in homely Yorkshire accents that they saw “our people” as being at war with “your people”. British police claimed last month to have thwarted a more elaborate plot, also by British Muslims, to destroy up to ten transatlantic airliners. In June police in Toronto arrested a dozen Canadian Muslims for planning attacks, including, it is said, a plan to seize and behead the prime minister.

To many susceptible Muslims the message that the faith is everywhere under attack is evidently compelling. Jihadists are skilled at weaving the “resistance” in Palestine, Lebanon, Kashmir, Chechnya, Iraq and Afghanistan into a single narrative of persecution by the infidel. Of the 15m to 18m Muslims who live in Europe (excluding Turkey), the percentage who sympathise with the bombers is small. But the hijackers proved in America, and the train bombers of March 2004 in Madrid, that small numbers of terrorists can produce devastating results—and a few percent of 15m is still a big number.

To the secular mind, the jihadists' notion that the faith is everywhere under attack looks absurd. How can conflicts as different as those in Palestine, the Caucasus, Kashmir and the Balkans, even East Timor, be interpreted as parts of a seamless conspiracy against Islam? In Kosovo, for goodness sake, NATO intervened to protect Muslims from Christians, not the other way round. And yet a troubling recent development is the emergence in America of an equal and opposite distortion. This is the idea that it is the West and its values that are everywhere under attack, and everywhere by the same seamless front of what Mr Bush has taken to calling “Islamic fascism”, as if this conflict is akin to the second world war or the cold war against communism. “We are in the early stages of what I would describe as the third world war,” Newt Gingrich, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, said in July.

What's new, and what isn't
It is wrong to look at the post-September 11th world this way, as if every local conflict is part of a civilisational clash. Mr Gingrich was speaking about the Lebanon war. But not every Islamist movement is inspired by the ideas that animate al-Qaeda. In Palestine Hamas is a pious (and vicious) version of a national-liberation movement with local goals, not another front in a global fight. Ditto, more or less, Hizbullah, except that it is also a tool of Iran. And Iran itself is better understood as an assertive rising (and dangerous) power that happens to have a theocratic constitution than as an ally of al-Qaeda, whose ideas come from a separate strand of Islam.

Al-Qaeda did not invent terrorism. In its Baader-Meinhof or Shining Path or Irish or Basque or Palestinian guise, terrorism was the background noise of the second half of the 20th century. But September 11th seemed to portend something new. There was something different in the sheer epic malevolence of the thing: more than 3,000 dead, with destruction sliding out of a clear blue sky, all captured on live TV. Most previous terror organisations had negotiable demands and therefore exercised a measure of restraint. Al-Qaeda's fantastic aims—sweeping away regimes, reversing history and restoring the caliphate—are married to an appetite for killing that knows no limits. It boasts openly that it is seeking nuclear weapons.

Mass terrorism by Islamist extremists remains a danger. To say that America's mistakes have increased the threat is not to say that America caused it. It is important to remember who attacked whom five years ago. Islam had its deadly and inchoate grievances before the Iraq war and before September 11th. The world must still strive to destroy al-Qaeda and, even more, the idea it represents. But it had better do so with cleverer means than those Mr Bush has used so far.

NY TIMES EDITORIAL

The feelings of sadness and loss with which we look back on Sept. 11, 2001, have shifted focus over the last five years. The attacks themselves have begun to acquire the aura of inevitability that comes with being part of history. We can argue about what one president or another might have done to head them off, but we cannot really imagine a world in which they never happened, any more than we can imagine what we would be like today if the Japanese had never attacked Pearl Harbor.

What we do revisit, over and over again, is the period that followed, when sorrow was merged with a sense of community and purpose. How, having lost so much on the day itself, did we also manage to lose that as well?

The time when we felt drawn together, changed by the shock of what had occurred, lasted long beyond the funerals, ceremonies and promises never to forget. It was a time when the nation was waiting to find out what it was supposed to do, to be called to the task that would give special lasting meaning to the tragedy that it had endured.

But the call never came. Without ever having asked to be exempt from the demands of this new post-9/11 war, we were cut out. Everything would be paid for with the blood of other people’s children, and with money earned by the next generation. Our role appeared to be confined to waiting in longer lines at the airport. President Bush, searching the other day for an example of post-9/11 sacrifice, pointed out that everybody pays taxes.

That pinched view of our responsibility as citizens got us tax cuts we didn’t need and an invasion that never would have occurred if every voter’s sons and daughters were eligible for the draft. With no call to work together on some effort greater than ourselves, we were free to relapse into a self- centeredness that became a second national tragedy. We have spent the last few years fighting each other with more avidity than we fight the enemy.

When we measure the possibilities created by 9/11 against what we have actually accomplished, it is clear that we have found one way after another to compound the tragedy. Homeland security is half-finished, the development at ground zero barely begun. The war against terror we meant to fight in Afghanistan is at best stuck in neutral, with the Taliban resurgent and the best economic news involving a bumper crop of opium. Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11 when it was invaded, is now a breeding ground for a new generation of terrorists.

Listing the sins of the Bush administration may help to clarify how we got here, but it will not get us out. The country still hungers for something better, for evidence that our leaders also believe in ideas larger than their own political advancement.

Today, every elected official in the country will stop and remember 9/11. The president will remind the country that he has spent most of his administration fighting terrorism, and his opponents will point out that Osama bin Laden is still at large. It would be miraculous if the best of our leaders did something larger — expressed grief and responsibility for the bad path down which we’ve gone, and promised to work together to turn us in a better direction.

Over the last week, the White House has been vigorously warning the country what awful things would happen in Iraq if American troops left, while his critics have pointed out how impossible the current situation is. They are almost certainly both right. But unless people on both sides are willing to come up with a plan that acknowledges both truths and accepts the risk of making real-world proposals, we will be stuck in the same place forever. If that kind of coming together happened today, we could look back on Sept. 11, 2006, as more than a day for recalling bad memories and lost chances.

NYC Unveils 9/11 Memorial Hole