after-words.org

What If 9/11 Never Happened? -- New York Magazine
A counterhistory.
By John Heilemann

There are days in New York—surprisingly many of them, all things considered—when it’s almost possible to forget that we are living in an age of terror. And then there are days, like last Thursday with its headlines out of London, when that grim reality rises up and slaps us hard upside the head. When we’re reminded that there really are ideological-cum-religious fanatics intent on slaughtering us in large numbers. When we realize that these zealots aren’t merely crazy but determined and ingenious. When we’re forced to admit that we are, deep down, more scared than we ever let on.

It is almost five years since that fear was imposed on us and the age of terror began in earnest. From the moment the Twin Towers fell, 9/11 was seen as a watershed, a historical turning point of grand and irreversible proportions. With the acrid smoke still swirling above ground zero, the mantras repeated constantly were that 9/11 had “changed everything”—that “nothing would ever be the same.”

By now we see those mantras for what they were: natural, perhaps inevitable, exaggerations in the face of gargantuan trauma. So much about how we live our lives today remains the same as it ever was. And yet, at the same time, we all know (or think we know) that vast changes have in fact been spawned by 9/11—political, cultural, and sociological; intellectual, emotional, and psychological—in New York, throughout America, and around the world. The question is precisely what they are.

As a way of marking the fifth anniversary of 9/11, we’ve attempted to provide an answer—or, rather, many answers. But we’ve done so in a roundabout manner: by asking an assortment of big thinkers and public figures to address the question, What if 9/11 never happened? Now, let’s be clear, we’re well aware that the dangers of counterfactual speculation (If Bobby Kennedy had never been shot, then Nixon would never have been elected! So no Watergate! No Carter! No Reagan! Etc., etc., etc.) are almost as grave as those of unbridled futurism. But we also see the virtues of an approach that appeals both to left-brain analytics and right-brain imagination—and that, in the process, tends to uproot subterranean assumptions and challenge conventional wisdom.

The most glaring item in the latter category (at least on the left) is the canard that, if not for 9/11, the United States would not be a country at war. But as a number of the voices in the pages that follow argue convincingly, a clash between the West and the forces of jihadism—and, in particular, between America and Al Qaeda—was inevitable. Osama bin Laden’s campaign against the U.S. had been under way for nearly a decade; the only question was when, not whether, it would land upon these shores. As Andrew Sullivan suggests in his alternative-present blog, America should perhaps consider itself lucky that 9/11 took place when it did (thus giving the country an early warning of the battle ahead) and that it wasn’t worse. In a parallel history that avoids easy morals, he draws a path that leads us to an even more dire version of where we are today: in the midst of a long twilight struggle against a lethal enemy....