The attack on September 11th had very little to do with the physical attack. It had very little to do with the sudden realization that we were vulnerable. That was not the reason that the terrorists attacked us, or at least not by any stretch the primary reason. To say that the terrorist attack was to show the world that we were vulnerable to a physical attack is to say that their objective, like that of the Japanese during World War II, was to draw us into battle. Had that been the case, they could have attacked anything in the United States. They could have attacked the CDC in Atlanta. They could have attacked only "military" targets. They could have attacked our water supplies. No, the attack on September 11th was not about physically attacking us. The terrorists were very specific about their targets. Remember what their targets were? The Twin Towers stand out because of the thousands of people that were killed in those attacks, but remember the statements made by Bin Laden after the attacks? Remember when he said that the collapse of the towers was never something that they anticipated? Remember the other two targets, the White House and the Pentagon? Not exactly the best place to get a high body count or a high cost of physical damage. These attacks were very precise and calculated attacks against our ideology. Our relationship to the world is one that is mediated by images, such that accounts from people who saw the towers hit in person told of how they immediately rushed to the nearest television to verify what they had just seen with their own eyes. That we still don't see this, that there are people saying that we need another 9/11 to remind us who the enemy is (the terrorists), shows just how much our actions and our way of being in the world is constituted by and mediated by the images we view everyday. The images used against us, were images of our own design. The terrorists simply set up a stage on which we could watch our proud image attack ourselves. Once tower 1 was hit, every camera in the country was practically poised and ready to capture the attack on the second tower. We thought the first tower was it. That that was the extent of the attack on us. So, we set up to watch the aftermath of the attack in order to take back the images that the terrorists created. The sin, to us, was that an American image was attacked. It's why flag burning is such a successful protest tactic. The flag speaks and it says all that is great about the United States. When it is burned it is done so because the burner claims that the flag was heretical. The flag, like the witches in Salem and the books burned by totalitarian states speaks against the ideals of those with the matches. The towers spoke. They spoke of the American empire. They spoke of our ability to rise into the sky. They spoke of our ability to fly into the sky and accomplish great undreamt of feats. They spoke of our ability to change the shape of the world. But the terrorists speak a different language and they heard the towers with different ears. To them, the towers spoke of our want to impose our will on the rest of the world. To them, the towers spoke of our belief that the earth is ours to shape and manipulate. To them, the towers spoke of our belief that we could rebuild the tower of Babel. To them, the towers spoke of our own supremeness. Their attacks on the towers were not about the physical buildings, nor were they about the death of the people within those buildings. They were attacking what the towers were saying. They were attacking us ideologically.
When the towers fell, when we were beginning to mourn but not fully understanding what we were mourning, we had the world in the palm of our hands. The world was ready to do our will, to help us set right that which had gone terribly wrong. They joined us in a war in Afghanistan. What would it take to ask another to kill for you? What would it take for that other to actually agree to kill for you? Imagine what might have been accomplished had our request to the world not been made in anger or hatred for those that harmed us. Imagine if we asked the world to, rather than follow our lead and gain retribution, to guide us to a place of international reconciliation. The attacks on 9/11 were not about showing our vulnerability. We had been attacked before. Pearl Harbor, Oklahoma City, the Twin Towers in 1993, The assassinations of our presidents. What the attacks ended up doing was showing that given the opportunity to use the resources of other countries, we would exploit those resources. We would try to rebuild our empire with force rather than love. We would rebuild alone using free labor rather than rebuild with others. We would command rather than collaborate. We would hear the towers speak through the ears of the terrorists and pretend that they were saying what we wanted to hear.
