Only relatively small numbers of New Yorkers actually experienced 9/11 firsthand: those at the tip of Manhattan or close enough to watch the two planes smash into the World Trade Center towers, to watch (as some schoolchildren did) people leaping or falling from the upper floors of those buildings, to be enveloped in the vast cloud of smoke and ash, in the tens of thousands of pulverized computers and copying machines, the asbestos and flesh and plane, the shredded remains of millions of sheets of paper, of financial and office life as we know it. For most Americans, even those like me who were living in Manhattan, 9/11 arrived on the television screen. This is why what leapt to mind—and instantaneously filled our papers and TV reporting—was previous screen life, the movies.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the news was peppered with comments about, thoughts about, and references to films. Reporters, as Caryn James wrote in the New York Times that first day, “compared the events to Hollywood action movies”; as did op-ed writers (“The scenes exceeded the worst of Hollywood’s disaster movies”); columnists (“On TV, two national landmarks…look like the aftermath in the film Independence Day”); and eyewitnesses (“It was like one of them Godzilla movies”; “And then I saw an explosion straight out of The Towering Inferno ”). Meanwhile, in an irony of the moment, Hollywood scrambled to excise from upcoming big- and small-screen life anything that might bring to mind thoughts of 9/11, including, in the case of Fox, promotion for the premiere episode of 24, in which “a terrorist blows up an airplane.”
In our guts, we had always known it was coming. Like any errant offspring, Little Boy and Fat Man, those two atomic packages with which we had paid them back for Pearl Harbor, were destined to return home someday. No wonder the single, omnipresent historical reference in the media in the wake of the attacks was Pearl Harbor or, as screaming headlines had it, INFAMY, or A NEW DAY OF INFAMY. We had just experienced “the Pearl Harbor of the 21st Century,” or, as R. James Woolsey, former CIA director (and neocon), said in the Washington Post that first day, “It is clear now, as it was on December 7, 1941, that the United States is at war.… The question is: with whom?”
The Day After
No wonder what came instantly to mind was a nuclear event. No wonder, according to a New York Times piece, Tom Brokaw, then chairing NBC’s nonstop news coverage, “may have captured it best when he looked at videotape of people on a street, everything and everyone so covered with ash…[and said] it looked ‘like a nuclear winter in lower Manhattan.’” No wonder the Tennessean and the Topeka Capital-Journal both used the headline “The Day After,” lifted from a famous 1983 TV movie about nuclear Armageddon.
No wonder the area where the two towers fell was quickly dubbed “Ground Zero,” a term previously reserved for the spot where an atomic explosion had occurred. On September 12, for example, the Los Angeles Times published a full-page series of illustrations of the attacks on the towers headlined: “Ground Zero.” By week’s end, it had become the only name for “the collapse site,” as in a September 18 New York Times headline, “Many Come to Bear Witness at Ground Zero.”
No wonder the events seemed so strangely familiar. We had been living with the possible return of our most powerful weaponry via TV and the movies, novels and our own dream-life, in the past, the future, and even—thanks to a John F. Kennedy TV appearance on October 22, 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis to tell us that our world might end tomorrow—in something like the almost-present.
So many streams of popular culture had fed into this. So many “previews” had been offered. Everywhere in those decades, you could see yourself or your compatriots or the enemy “Hiroshimated” (as Variety termed it back in 1947). Even when Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn’t kissing Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies as an atomic explosion went off somewhere in the Florida Keys or a playground filled with American kids wasn’t being atomically blistered in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, even when it wasn’t literally nuclear, that apocalyptic sense of destruction lingered as the train, bus, blimp, explosively armed, headed for us in our unknowing innocence; as the towering inferno, airport, city, White House was blasted away, as we were offered Pompeii-scapes of futuristic destruction in what would, post-9/11, come to be known as “the homeland.”
Sometimes it came from outer space armed with strange city-blasting rays; other times irradiated monsters rose from the depths to stomp our cities (in the 1998 remake of Godzilla—New York City, no less). After Darth Vader used his Death Star to pulverize a whole planet in Star Wars, planets were regularly nuclearized in Saturday-morning TV cartoons. In our imaginations, post-1945, we were always at planetary Ground Zero.
Dystopian Serendipity
Increasingly, from Hamburg to Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, others were also watching our spectaculars, our catastrophes, our previews; and so, as Hollywood historian Neal Gabler would write in the New York Times only days after 9/11, they were ready to deliver what we had long dreamed of with the kind of timing—insuring, for instance, that the second plane arrived “at a decent interval” after the first, so that the cameras could be in place—and in a visual language American viewers would understand.
But here’s the catch: What came, when it came, on September 11, 2001, wasn’t what we thought came. There was no Ground Zero, because there was nothing faintly atomic about the attacks. It wasn’t the apocalypse at all. Except in its success, it hardly differed from the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the one that almost toppled one tower with a rented Ryder van and a homemade bomb.
What “changed everything,” as the phrase would soon go, was a bit of dystopian serendipity for al-Qaeda: Nineteen men of much conviction and middling skills, armed with exceedingly low-tech weaponry and two hijacked jets, managed to create an apocalyptic look that, in another context, would have made the special-effects masters of George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic proud. And from that—and the Bush administration’s reaction to it—everything else would follow.
The tiny band of fanatics who planned September 11 essentially lucked out. If the testimony, under CIA interrogation techniques, of al-Qaeda’s master planner Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is to be believed, what happened stunned even him. (“According to the [CIA] summary, he said he ‘had no idea that the damage of the first attack would be as catastrophic as it was.’”) Those two mighty towers came crumbling down in that vast, roiling, near-mushroom cloud of white smoke before the cameras, in the fashion of the ultimate Hollywood action film (imagery multiplied in its traumatizing power by thousands of replays over a record-setting more than ninety straight hours of TV coverage). And that imagery fit perfectly the secret expectations of Americans—just as it fit the needs of both al-Qaeda and the Bush administration.
That’s undoubtedly why other parts of the story of that moment faded from sight. For example, take American Flight 77, which plowed into the Pentagon. That destructive but non-apocalyptic-looking attack didn’t satisfy the same built-in expectations. Though the term “ground zero Washington” initially floated through the media ether, it never stuck. Similarly, the unsolved anthrax murders-by-mail of almost the same moment, which caused a collective shudder of horror, are now forgotten. (According to a LexisNexis search, between October 4 and December 4, 2001, 260 stories appeared in the New York Times and 246 in the Washington Post with “anthrax” in the headline. That’s the news equivalent of a high-pitched scream of horror.) Those envelopes, spilling highly refined anthrax powder and containing letters dated “9/11/01” with lines like “Death to America, Death to Israel, Allah Is Great,” represented the only use of a weapon of mass destruction ( WMD) in this period, yet they were slowly eradicated from our collective (and media) memory once it became clearer that the perpetrator or perpetrators were probably homegrown, possibly out of the very cold war U.S. weapons labs that produced so many WMD in the first place.
The 36-Hour War
Indulge me, then, for a moment on an otherwise grim subject. I’ve always been a fan of what-if history and scie
nce fiction, which led me to take my own modest time machine—the IRT subway—back to September 11, 2001, via the New York Public Library, a building that—in the realm where sci-fi and what-if history meld—suffered its own monstrous “damage,” its own 9/11, only months after the A-bombing of Hiroshima.
In November 1945, Life magazine published “The 36-Hour War,” an overheated what-if tale in which an unnamed enemy in “equatorial Africa” launched a surprise atomic missile attack on the United States, resulting in ten million deaths. A dramatic illustration accompanying the piece showed the library’s two pockmarked stone lions still standing, guarding a ground-zero scene of almost total destruction, while heavily shielded technicians tested “the rubble of the shattered city for radioactivity.”
I passed those same majestic lions, still standing (as was the library), entered the microfiche room and began reading the New York Times starting with the September 12, 2001, issue. Immediately I was plunged into an apocalypse: “gates of hell,” “the unthinkable,” “nightmare world of Hieronymus Bosch,” “hellish storm of ash, glass, smoke, and leaping victims,” “clamorous inferno,” “an ashen shell of itself, all but a Pompeii.” But one of the most common words in the Times and elsewhere was “vulnerable” (or as a Times piece put it, “nowhere was safe”). The front page of the Chicago Tribune caught this mood in a headline, “Feeling of Invincibility Suddenly Shattered,” and a lead sentence, “On Tuesday, America the invincible became America the vulnerable.” We had faced “the kamikazes of the 21st century”—a Pearl Harborish phrase that would gain traction—and we had lost.
A what-if thought came to mind as I slowly rolled that grainy microfiche; as I passed the photo of a man, in midair, falling headfirst from a World Trade Center tower; as I read this observation from a Pearl Harbor survivor interviewed by the Tribune: “Things will never be the same again in this country”; as I reeled section by section, day by day toward our distinctly changed present; as I read all those words that boiled up like a linguistic storm around the photos of those white clouds; as I considered all the op-eds and columns filled with instant opinions that poured into the pages of our papers before there was time to think; as I noted, buried in their pages, a raft of words and phrases—“preempt,” “a new Department of Pre-emption [at the Pentagon],” “homeland defenses,” “homeland security agency”—readying themselves to be noticed.
Among them all, the word that surfaced fastest on the heels of that “new Day of Infamy,” and to deadliest effect, was “war.” Senator John McCain, among many others, labeled the attacks “an act of war” on the spot, just as Republican senator Richard Shelby insisted that “this is total war,” just as Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer started his first editorial that first day, “This is not crime. This is war.”
On the night of September 11, the president himself, addressing the nation, already spoke of winning “the war against terrorism.” By day two, he was using the phrase “acts of war”; by day three, “the first war of the twenty-first century” (while the Times reported “a drumbeat for war” on television); by week’s end, “the long war”; and the following week, in an address to a joint session of Congress, while announcing the creation of a cabinet-level Office of Homeland Security, he wielded “war” twelve times. (“Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there.”)
What If?
What if the two hijacked planes, American Flight 11 and United Flight 175, had plunged into those north and south towers at 8:46 and 9:03, killing all aboard, causing extensive damage and significant death tolls, but neither tower had come down? What if, as a Tribune columnist called it, photogenic “scenes of apocalypse” had not been produced? What if, despite two gaping holes and the smoke and flames pouring out of the towers, the imagery had been closer to that of 1993? What if there had been no giant cloud of destruction capable of bringing to mind the look of “the day after,” no images of crumbling towers worthy of Independence Day?
We would surely have had blazing headlines, but would they have commonly had “war” or “infamy” in them, as if we had been attacked by another state? Would the last superpower have gone from “invincible” to “vulnerable” in a split second? Would our newspapers instantly have been writing “before” and “after” editorials, or insisting that this moment was the ultimate “test” of George W. Bush’s until-then languishing presidency? Would we instantaneously have been considering taking what CIA director George Tenet would soon call “the shackles” off our intelligence agencies and the military? Would we have been reconsidering, as Florida’s Democratic senator Bob Graham suggested that first day, rescinding the congressional ban on the assassination of foreign officials and heads of state? Would a Washington Post journalist have been trying within hours to name the kind of “war” we were in? (He provisionally labeled it “the Gray War.”) Would New York Times columnist Tom Friedman on the third day have had us deep into “World War III”? Would the Times have been headlining and quoting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on its front page on September 14, insisting that “it’s not simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism.” (The Times editorial writers certainly noticed that ominous “s” on “states” and wrote the next day: “but we trust [Wolfowitz] does not have in mind invading Iraq, Iran, Syria and Sudan as well as Afghanistan.”)
Would state-to-state “war” and “acts of terror” have been so quickly conjoined in the media as a “war on terror” and would that phrase have made it, in just over a week, into a major presidential address? Could the Los Angeles Daily News have produced the following four-day series of screaming headlines, beating even the president to the punch: “Terror”/ “Horror!”/“‘This Is War’”/“War on Terror”?
If it all hadn’t seemed so familiar, wouldn’t we have noticed what was actually new in the attacks of September 11? Wouldn’t more people have been as puzzled as the reporter who asked White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, “You don’t declare war against an individual, surely”? Wouldn’t Congress have balked at passing, three days later, an almost totally open-ended resolution granting the president the right to use force not against one nation (Afghanistan) but against “nations,” plural and unnamed?
And how well would the Bush administration’s fear-inspired nuclear agenda have worked, if those buildings hadn’t come down? Would Saddam Hussein’s supposed nuclear program and stores of WMD have had the same impact? Would the endless linking of the Iraqi dictator, al-Qaeda, and 9/11 have penetrated so deeply that, in 2006, half of all Americans, according to a Harris poll, still believed Saddam had WMD when the U.S. invasion began, and 85 percent of American troops stationed in Iraq, according to a Zogby poll, believed the U.S. mission there was mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks”?
Without that apocalyptic 9/11 imagery, would those fantasy Iraqi mushroom clouds pictured by administration officials rising over American cities, or those fantasy Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles capable of spraying our East Coast with chemical or biological weapons, or Saddam Hussein’s supposed search for African yellowcake (or even, today, the Iranian “bomb” that won’t exist for perhaps another decade, if at all) have so dominated American consciousness?
Would Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri be sitting in jail cells or be on trial by now? Would so many things have happened differently?
The Opportunity of a Lifetime
What if the attacks on September 11, 2001, had not been seen as a new Pearl Harbor? Only three months earlier, after all, Disney’s Pearl Harbor (the “sanitized” version, as Times columnist Frank Rich labeled it), a blockbuster made with extensive Pentagon help, had performed disappointingly at the multiplexes. As an event, it seemed irrelevant to American audiences until 9/11, when that ancient history—and the ancient retribution that went with it—wiped from the American brain the actual history of rece
nt decades, including our massive covert anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, out of which Osama bin Laden emerged.
Here’s the greatest irony: From that time of triumph in 1945, Americans had always secretly suspected that they were not “invincible” but exceedingly vulnerable, something both pop culture and the deepest fears of the cold war era only reinforced. Confirmation of that fact arrived with such immediacy on September 11 largely because it was already a gut truth. The ambulance chasers of the Bush administration, who spotted such opportunity in the attacks, were perhaps the last Americans who hadn’t absorbed this reality. As that New Day of Infamy scenario played out, the horrific but actual scale of the damage inflicted in New York and Washington (and to the U.S. economy) would essentially recede. The attack had been relatively small, limited in its means and massive only in its daring and luck—abetted by the fact that the Bush administration was looking for nothing like such an attack, despite that CIA briefing given to Bush on a lazy August day in Crawford (“Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US”) and so many other clues.
Only the week before 9/11, the Bush administration had been in the doldrums with a “detached,” floundering president criticized by worried members of his own party for vacationing far too long at his Texas ranch while the nation drifted. Moreover, there was only one group before September 11 with a “new Pearl Harbor” scenario on the brain. Major administration figures, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, had wanted for years to radically increase the power of the president and the Pentagon, to roll back the power of Congress (especially any congressional restraints on the presidency left over from the Vietnam and Watergate era), and to complete the overthrow of Saddam Hussein (“regime change”) aborted by the first Bush administration in 1991.
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