9/11: Ten years on

The day the Twin towers were attacked I was with Tony Blair.

I was in Brighton sent by the FT to cover the TUC annual conference. I have a vivid image of the PM and his entourage changing plans on the hoof and turning round from a speech he was due to give to trade unionists on New Labour’s latest reform agenda as the images came live on TV. He and his team rushed past me and a group of fellow journalists and headed back to London.

Reflecting on that moment ten years on , Blair defended the actions taken in the wake of the attack, and insisted that to blame the subsequent US-led ‘war on terror’ for radicalising  Muslims was naive in the extreme.  I agree with him, but perhaps not exactly in the way he would like me to.

It is only too easy ten years on to focus on the subsequent failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to digest uncomfortably over breakfast the daily recipe of reports about cases of illegal rendition and torture which seem to paint yesterday’s terrorist as today’s violated hero. Those of us who, as journalists,  have had to cover terrororism suspects in court will know of  their individual stories of radicalisation post 9/11, as well as of the responsibility of those who encouraged them to murder. All this now forms a part of our history as indeed do other developments of the last ten years which arguably will have more of an impact long-term on the shape that our world takes such as the growing power of China, India, and Brazil- and by contrast the sense of financial, social, and political crisis with which the US and western Europe seem to be struggling with.

But it’s worth reminding ourselves of the sheer horror of  9/11 and how it was the product less of a legitimate sense of grievance against US imperialism by the developing world (and not even that could  justify what happened) than  a carefully planned operation prepared by the propagators of a medieval fundamentalism bent on carnage on a mass scale against human beings across nations.

To blame Blair is to be sunk into a false sense of  complacency and to underestimate the continuing challenge to our security posed by violent fundamentalists ,notwithstanding  the death  of Bin laden and the positive shoots of the Middle East uprisings.