nmah5280.xml

nmah5280.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-11-11

I had literally moved to the former Soviet republic of Georgia 2 weeks prior. I was still getting settled, never having lived outside the United States before. At the time, I was teaching a seminar on campaigns and elections to some Georgian political operatives at a place called Gudauri, in the Caucasus mountains. I had finished the training session and went back to my hotel room. I crashed out on the bed, being fairly tired, listening to the BBC on television. This was a little before 6pm Georgian time.

Right before the change of the hour I heard the announcer on BBC state that they had just gotten word that an airplane had collided with one of the towers at the World Trade Center.

My immediate thought was that it must have been a Cessna or some other small plane, because nothing else would be flying that low. There were a few minutes while the BBC changed over the hour. I rolled over to get a look at the picture they would be broadcasting.

What I saw was beyond belief.

A gaping maw in one of the towers, belching flame and smoke. It was readily apparent that this was not a Cessna.

Instantly my mind began to think of how this could have happened? A jetliner losing control coming out of Newark or LaGuardia? JFK didn't route planes over the City, right? But how could it have hit the tower? What would be the odds of hitting the tower?

Then, as I was watching that static shot of the first tower burning, something came screaming in from the right hand side of the frame. Because the shot was taken from an angle so that one tower obscured the other, I saw the object disappear for a fraction of a second and then another ball of flame shoot towards the left edge of the frame.

My initial reaction was "what the hell was that?!"

I thought maybe they had footage of the tower being hit by the plane, but that couldn't be the case. Because the tower in the foreground was already burning! It was after the plane had hit.

But no explanation was forthcoming from the BBC announcers. They just kept on talking as if nothing had happened. I'm sitting there tryig to figure out what I just saw -- convincing myself that it couldn't really have been anything because if it was *someone* would have mentioned it, right?

About 10 minutes later, the BBC announcers state that a *second* plane had hit the other tower. At that point, it came to me that there was no way that this could possibly have been accidental.

I thought about calling my mom. But it was already 9:20 or so back in New York. She would have been on a train into the City so I couldn't get to her. I'd just have to hope she was all right, which I was pretty confident of because they either would have shut down train traffic into the City already, or she'd be in Penn Station making her way uptown (away from the attack).

I called my ex-girlfriend and my father in LA to see if they could get me anymore information on what was going on, but everyone else was in the same boat. After about a half an hour it became impossible to call into the States.

I watched BBC most of the rest of the night, starved for information. Unfortunately, outside the capital city of Tbilisi, I had no access to the internet so my ability to get information or communicate was circumscribed.

I still work overseas teaching political operatives about campaigns, elections and political party organizing (recently moving to Azerbaijan) My life itself has changed only in the sense that I believe the work I do now is not only interesting but is actually, to an extent, important to the security of the United States.

Coming from an academic background in security studies, I've always tended to look at democracy promotion as a side show. Beneficial, yes, but ultimately disconnected from our real security concerns.

I do not necessarily hold that view anymore. The question in the days after September 11th was "Why do they hate us so much?"

To me the answer was always readily apparent to me. It was no mystery. The medieval cultural outlook personified by people like bin Laden is threatened by the power of the West. The West may, in fact, wish them no ill. But that's not the point. Western values, the values of the Enlightment are slowly usurping the traditional medieval values that hold sway in the region. bin Laden and his ilk hate us not so much for any particular act, but because we are, literally, usurping their culture.

In his book "The End of History and the Last Man" Francis Fukayama posits that we are at "the end of history," meaning, not specifically the end of history but the end of confilct of ideologies. Specifically, the West, the values of the Enlightment (political pluralism, market economy, cultural pluralism and tolerance, science and reason) has usurped all other competing ideologies; monarchism, fascism, communism, etc. There is nothing left to stand in the way of universal application of Western values.

In this particular theory, he was wrong in only one respect. There is still one challenger culture left, and that culture springs from the Islamic world. While most of the Islamic world may not brook such horrific acts as those that occurred on September 11th, the usurpation of their culture by Western values is of extreme importance in their psyche, and thus they (understandably) react with hostility at the alleged "imperialism" of the West.

Until September 11th, this cultural clash was not truly of concern to me. Eventually, as Fukayama predicts, all states in the world will be compelled to follow the Western model, because no other model has proven to be successful. And then when all states are basically westernized, there will be nothing left to fight about. In the meantime, it was necessary only to keep the rest of the world stable. Whether or not there were elements in the world who truly hated us was not our concern.

Oderint dum metuant. Let them hate, as long as they fear.

But September 11th demonstrated that, although the usurpation of medieval islam by the West may be inevitable, it may not be happening on a time table required to ensure our security.

Therefore, my role, as an active missionary for the Enlightenment, seems to have taken on, for me at least, a new importance.

Even though the scope of the human tragedy was immense, the reason September 11th will be remembered 100 years from now is that it will come to be seen as the joining of the final battle for the ascendency of the Enlightenment over the mind of man.

As a personal memory, when I flew out of Newark International Airport on August 30th, destined for a far off and unknown land, the last thing I saw from the window of the plane was lower manhattan, dominated by the illuminated twin towers. The plane banked hard to the right, obscuring the view and that was the last I saw of my country or the towers.

I always have an American flag with me, but I must admit I am more partial to my copy of the Constitution. I believe I read the Constitution 20 times that week.