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It's now one year since I heard of the destruction of the World Trade Center while driving to my polling place (for primary elections) and time to reflect on some of the things that seem to have been missed or mistaken. (For non-US readers, I am writing this primarily as a US citizen. You will feel excluded from some of my comments. I don't see how that can be helped.)
1. Airport security worked on September 11
Simply, the hijackers used knives, not guns. A knife can be a fearsome weapon, but a gun is more so. Specifically, as the passengers of United Flight 93 showed, a man with a knife can be successfully attacked by a group of people; this is much harder with a man with a gun. As long as we can keep gunmen off the aircraft, we have reduced the problem to one the passengers can probably deal with.
2. Most changes in airport security have been irrelevant
The most important single change was made by the passengers of United 93, the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. It is a change in attitude: if your airplane is hijacked, fight back. Formerly, the practice was to keep calm and wait for rescue. Men and women armed with blankets can subdue knife-wielding terrorists.
Strengthening the cockpit entry is also a good response to the hijackings. This means it's the pilot's job to get the plane to the ground if he thinks hijacking is going on. (If he or she is wrong, and lands the plane prematurely, a few hundred people at most will be inconvenienced. This is acceptable.) Putting air marshalls on flights is also a good idea, although they have to have a way of identifying themselves, lest terrorists disguise themselves as air marshalls. (I believe the flight crews are introduced to the sky marshalls, and so the reaction of the flight crews should be identification enough.)
Aside from this, the security changes have mostly been cosmetic. Nobody's safer if nail clippers are confiscated, since a hijacker could easily smuggle better weapons than that. (Can you bring glass liquor bottles onto a plane currently? A broken bottle is deadly.) Even if we had adequate technology for automatic face recognition (which we don't), we don't have good pictures of most terrorists. If all the changes in airport security since last year were undone, we'd be just as safe.
The same is true of other security measures. We have to decide what the threat is, and how a security measure is going to solve it, assuming intelligent opponents. A national identification card may or may not be a good idea, but it isn't going to stop terrorists, who will acquire forged ones, or acquire genuine ones illicitly (such as the illegally acquired Virginia driver's licenses). Tracking down foreign nationals whose visas have expired may also be a good thing, but if that had been our practice the terrorists would have made sure they had valid visas. Cracking down on illegal immigrants may be well and good, but the terrorists entered the country legally.
3. We don't need more surveillance ability.
We have learned that various authorities had plenty of clues leading to the acts, but didn't put them together. Adding more information collection will not help. What we need is more use of the information already gathered. This requires a new mindset among those using the information, as well as more imagination.
Fundamentally, people are going to be very slow to recognize clues to things they don't think of as possibilities. Had somebody thought, ahead of time, that terrorists might hijack an airplane and fly it into a building, the fact that a foreign national was interested in learning to fly a commercial airliner, but not take off or land it, would have been a dead giveaway. Had somebody been seriously wondering about what possible enemies might do, they might have taken this as a tip.
Going into December 7, 1941, the authorities at Pearl Harbor had enough information to justify going on a high level of alert, but none of them thought of a Japanese air raid from aircraft carriers as a possibility, and so were were completely surprised. The Battle of the Bulge came as a great surprise in December 1944, not because there were no clues that the Germans were planning something in the Ardennes Forest, but because nobody believed the Germans could or would launch a large counteroffensive. I can multiply these examples, but the point is clear: People will not properly consider evidence for something they don't believe a possibility, either because they've dismissed it or because they haven't thought of it.
4. The United States was not badly hurt.
We were shocked, but in real terms the loss of a few thousand lives and several buildings, no matter how large, does not constitute grave damage to the US. We are still as strong as we were.
Nor has the US undergone unprecedented suffering. This is, I believe, by far the most destructive and murderous small terrorist operation in history, but is far exceeded by large terrorist operations and wars. For anybody who wonders where God was on September 11, 2001, I ask where that person thinks God was during the Nazi genocides, or the Khmer Rouge genocides, or more recently the incredibly vicious ethnic violence in ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Almost all of us are still very lucky to be in the United States.
This is not meant to trivialize an event with thousands of personal tragedies, but rather to put it into perspective.
After several smaller acts, Al-Qaeda finally killed enough Americans to get our attention. How lucky for him.
5. This is not a crime of, or fault in, the religion of Islam
Right now, there are quite a few Muslim "holy" men who preach hatred, and state that the murder of innocent children is a holy act. This is deplorable, but it is neither a fundamental part of Islam nor is it unprecedented. It is easy to find periods in Christianity where quite a few Church leaders were preaching hatred: of infidels, of heretics, of various other groups. This was equally deplorable.
A Muslim acquaintance of mine said that he didn't realize what Islam really was until he came to the US, since in Pakistan the religious leaders confused a lot of secular and cultural things with Islam. In a country like the US, with so many ways to find out things, this happens to a much lesser extent. However, if one were to grow up in a Muslim community with hateful religious leaders, one would find oneself learning the wrong things. This is the fault of the leaders, not the religion.
6. September 11 is not a direct result of US actions
I have met people who claim that this is a direct result of US actions in the Middle East, and that in order to stop such things from occurring we have to drastically change our policies there.
However, US policies have remained fairly constant for decades, with relatively little terrorism affecting US citizens. The September 11 attacks were done by a well-organized and highly motivated small group, backed with plenty of money and a stable base of operations. Before Al-Qaeda, this simply didn't happen. If we can break up Al-Qaeda, most of the threat will be gone. We have already destroyed the government that was harboring them, which has got to be an object lesson for governments that might consider harboring them.
7. We have little to fear except fear itself
Al-Qaeda and any similar organization can't really hurt us badly. The people who can are the US people ourselves. We stand for individual liberty, individual judgement, and limits on authority. If we compromise these sufficiently to try to achieve safety, the terrorists have won.
8. This is a death struggle
One reason I am proud of my country is its embodiment of respect for the individual human being and his or her judgement. This is a fundamental basis of Western civilization that the US has helped lead. It has corollaries: we are very tolerant, and we can be reasonable.
On the other hand, our enemies believe in very rigid things, and have no regard for human judgement except on a low level. They are intolerant and unreasonable. There can be no compromise with them, for they will not compromise. The only way to escape their enmity is for them to die. We don't have to kill them, but we need to keep them powerless until they die of natural or unnatural causes.
9. We are going to win.
The respect for individuality that makes our enemies hate our culture makes us strong. With free enterprise, we create a tremendous amount of wealth. With widespread discussion, we can come to national consensuses that are much stronger than any imposed from above. Our enemies have carefully indoctrinated fanatics; we have well-trained people who have deliberately chosen to defend freedom, as well as individuals who can spontaneously react. The heroes of United Flight 93 learned, with our freedom of communication, what was going on, and spontaneously came up with a plan that foiled the terrorist intent. The heroes of the Fire Department of New York and other emergency workers knew what they were doing and why they were doing it. Our military forces are extremely effective, partly due to the level of individual initiative our armed forces encourage.
Respect for the individual means allowing individual potential to develop, and that is a tremendously powerful force.
All contents of these pages Copyright 2002 by David H. Thornley.