Jay Kuten: Time to wonder what have we lost

It is understandable that Americans might pause and reflect on the events of September 11, 2001, on its 10th anniversary.

The New York Times published an extensive section devoted to such reflection.

In a remarkable essay, its former executive editor, Bill Keller, apologised for his support of the invasion of Iraq undertaken, as he sees it, in response to that crime.

Of interest is the response of readers to that apology. Universally, they repudiated his gesture as "half-hearted", as too little, too late, in view of the deaths of thousands of soldiers, Americans and allies, and of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. The economic consequence of these wars, for which readers hold the paper partly responsible in regard to failures in reporting and analysis, were held up as contributors to the current economic crisis. An anticipated cost of US$4 trillion staggers the imagination.

Although 9-11 has passed, paraphrasing Faulkner, "the past is not dead, it's not even past". On the eve of commemorations, New York City went into lockdown alert mode. Traffic slowed to walking pace for inspections of vehicles and of subway passengers. A communications intercept had captured words like "bomb" and "truck" and "New York". In a few hours, the fear of a new attack took hold.

Sophisticated surveillance becomes a two-edged sword. Any foot soldier in al-Qaeda, knowing he may be overheard, can, with a cheap disposable cellphone, cause millions of dollars of security response and increase the fear level of a major city. That is asymmetric warfare at its worst.

In response to the question of what has been gained from 9-11, readers of the New York Times strongly argued that al-Qaeda had won. Osama bin Laden's goal was to drag the US into wars on Islamic countries, and by techniques of terrorist provocation elicit an over-response that would weaken and bankrupt the US. It is hard to find flaws in that argument.

The US has been at war for 60 years, counting the cold one with the Soviets. The current wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, have lasted 10 years. The law of emulation holds that prolonged, intense conflict results in the combatants coming to resemble one another. Dana Priest, a Washington Post staffer, reports in her documentary, Top Secret America, that there now exists a new national security state; a vast, secret apparatus of sophisticated surveillance, and in the name of preventing terrorist attacks, eavesdropping everywhere. The totality must include an archipelago of hidden structures beneath democratic scrutiny, that has done liberal democracies real damage: rendition, torture, detention without trial, Guant?mo, military tribunals.

The irony, redolent of Vietnam, is that we seem to be destroying democracy in order to save it.

While the commemorations of 9/11 are fit as part of memorial, they must give us pause.

In a larger sense - taking Lincoln's words at another place of human carnage, of horrendous fratricide, to a new meaning - we cannot consecrate nor hallow that ground. What we can hope to do is recognise that America is not unique in its suffering. That families of the dead in London, Madrid, Bali, Mumbai, Moscow, Hama, and Tel Aviv also know that agony. They are not searching for heroes but for a way to make meaning out of fragmented lives.

We've got to be more sparing of our citizens, of useless and baseless fears. We run the risk of generating a post-traumatic state in which people become apathetic and simultaneously hyper-vigilant but to no effect except neuro-endocrine exhaustion.

The fact is you can only rev people up and scare them so many times. Emotional responsiveness wears out and, with it, a diminution of empathy in favour of stark self-preservation.

What effective leaders do is call us to a higher purpose than ourselves. That is sorely lacking in the democracies today.