Editor's Letter: The reverberations of 9/11

last updated 8 January 2015

We all have our 9/11 memories, and this is mine: turning the corner onto Fifth Avenue on that crisp morning in New York, to find cars stopped in the street and stock-still pedestrians gaping at the scene downtown. There, against a perfect blue sky, the towers belched red hellfire and black smoke from sinister gashes. “Two planes?” I asked a cop. “Two,” he said. We nodded in recognition of what this meant: This was no accident, and everything would now change. And it did. Now the man who conjured up that dark day is finally gone, but we must give the devil his due. Like Stalin and Mao and Hitler before him, Osama bin Laden was a one-man pivot point in history. It is not yet possible to tally up, or fully comprehend, how the power of his fanaticism and magnetic personality changed the world.

Consider first the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, which have killed 6,000 Americans and more than 100,000 Iraqis and Afghans, and wounded tens of thousands more. The final cost of the wars may exceed $4 trillion. Add another $1 trillion for the added security in the U.S. alone. Since the attacks deepened the 2001 recession, the Fed dropped interest rates to nearly zero, which fueled the housing bubble that led to the 2008 Wall Street collapse. If national security were not the primary issue in 2004, George W. Bush may not have been re-elected. Had a Democrat won that year, Barack Obama would still be a senator from Illinois. The ripples and reverberations go on and on. In the end, bin Laden failed to realize his monstrous vision; he sleeps with the fishes. But he left an imprint—a scar—on all of our lives.