So where to start.
I'd talked a while back about some of the horrors this Journal had stood witness to. 5,000 deaths just felt too much to write about.
But my emotional dust is beginning to settle. So let's start with the obvious.
It did all look like a Hollywood movie. Images like the one below look just like stills from Die Hard, Armageddon, Terminator, Mars Attacks, Independence Day, etc, etc. All those Hollywood blockbusters which were built around the fact that we have the technology to show you what will never happen. Well, it did.
5,000 people is a lot of souls lost, willfully destroyed and I do not condone the action which brought it about but I have to place the events of 11 September into a broader context.
When rivers burst their banks in Indonesia, thousands of lives may be lost. Yes, it is an act of god rather than naked aggression. But what makes it less immediate is that there are not 100 video cameras trained on the suffering. The people washed away do not have mobile phones to leave anguished messages on answer machines for us to hear. The world's media look the other way and we are not invited to watch, time and time again, a plane slamming into a building or people jumping from 80 floors up.
I hope that military action is not taken. It makes no sense when the snows are due to send in troops at this juncture. And I do not see how taking out one man or any small group of men will settle this. It would be like Vietnam in the hills.
There needs to be an agreed diplomatic solution. There needs to be an agreed coalition not to give aid to the Talaban government. There needs to be a cessation of funds. There needs to be help for the people of Afghanistan to give them a reason to embrace a different regime. We need to achieve in a few years what it took 40 years to achieve in the Warsaw pact countries.
And there needs to be an understanding of Islam which like Christianity comes out of the desert but, unlike Christianity where God is love, in Islam Allah is merciful because he also wrathful. Islam is a warrior religion.
I think we need to understand why people might believe that the next logical step was to fly a plane into the side of a building. Surely not because it was a pleasant and a happy thing to do. The anger and rage at the indifference of American foreign policy over the years is startling.
When the Shah of Persia was overthrown and the Ayatollas were restored to power in a fundamentalist muslim state, it did not happen because the Shah's regime had been one of enlightened benefaction for all. It happened because America and the West had financially supported a ruthless, corrupt and repressive regime. And the people of Iran would take no more of it.
When the Arab world sees unwavering American support for the Israeli government throughout all of the atrocities perpetrated upon the Palestinian people, it understands that it has a true enemy. And one of the few good things to have come out of the past few weeks has been Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon waking up to the fact that those days may be numbered and that dialogue rather than aggression may be what is demanded in future. The photograph below was taken in Cairo three days before the collapse of the World Trade Centre.
