TAPPED has links to a number of liberal takes on the second anniversary of 9/11. Some of them are excellent. Fred Kaplan’s piece in Slate laments the consistently missed opportunities to respond to the Twin Towers attack with a renewed sense of international purpose and unity.
Remember? The French newspaper Le Monde, never one for trans-Atlantic sentimentalism, proclaimed, “We are all Americans.” The band outside Buckingham Palace played “The Star-Spangled Banner” during a changing of the guard, as thousands of Londoners tearfully waved American flags. Most significant, the European leaders of NATO, for the first time in the organization’s history, invoked Article 5 of its charter, calling on its 19 member-nations to treat the attack on America as an attack on them allÂ-a particularly moving gesture, as Article 5 had been intended to guarantee American retaliation against an attack on Europe.
But the Bush administration brushed aside these supportive gesturesÂ-and that may loom as the greatest tragedy of Sept. 11, apart from the tolls taken by the attack itself.
Josh Marshall is struck by the contrast of the public and political resiliance of the weeks after the attack and the “tawdriness” of the current political climate. And Robert Wright has another smart piece in the Times, this time looking back at how the attack seemed to put a pall over the age of globalization. All of them have a common theme: while internationalization and growing supranational governance will take a better setup than we currently have, it’s an urgent task. The right has a point that the UN may be too ineffectual to stop proliferation of terrorism. But whose fault is that? How can we make a body that is more effective?
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