Turning up the volume on terror

[Briar]

Simon Jenkins returns to the appallingly mismanaged response to the 9/11 attacks today, following his earlier article which can be found at:

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0908-36.htm

Turning up the volume on terror
In its reaction to the 9/11 attacks, America abandoned the customary self-control of democracy.

Simon Jenkins

As the jets slammed into the twin towers this day five years ago, I immediately felt a visceral surge of sympathy for the city where I lived as a boy and which I visit every year. I have always regarded New York as London's blood brother.

...Democracy was not damaged by the attack. Those who chose to take up the "white man's burden" and prescribe solutions to the world's problems - as had America since the fall of the Soviet empire - must accept that there would be prices to pay. There would be prices especially where that policing involved military aggression against lesser states, as we have seen in Sudan, Iraq and Serbia.

There could be no formal defence against acts such as this, certainly no military defence. Terrorists were shadowy people, moving from country to country, vulnerable only to assiduous intelligence. As a vast cloud rose over lower Manhattan I also wondered at the cheap construction of the building - a previous attack on it in 1993 had failed and thus been largely ignored by the authorities.

I wrote that to treat the outrage as a declaration of war would be to abandon the customary self-control of democracy. It would glorify the terrorists among their own class and people and help them do their work. Nobody, I wrote, should want to see Americans terrorised into overreaction. Overreaction would mean global isolation. An isolated and hated America would be a dangerous America. In this age, maturity lay in learning to live with madmen and sometimes that meant dying with them. That is the real price paid for freedom.

...

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/simon_jenkins/2006/09/post_364.html