Resume Subscription We are delighted that you'd like to resume your subscription. Please click confirm to resume now. Sponsored Offers. Most Popular News. Most Popular Opinion. Because media outlets were able to cover the incident so quickly, millions of people witnessed the second plane striking the South Tower in real-time a mere 17 minutes after the first impact. This was a defining moment as millions of people around the world experience the events precisely as they unfolded.
The still-young internet was strained that day. Cities represent humanity's greatest achievements - and greatest challenges. The World Economic Forum supports a number of projects designed to make cities cleaner, greener and more inclusive. These include hosting the Global Future Council on Cities and Urbanization , which gathers bright ideas from around the world to inspire city leaders, and running the Future of Urban Development and Services initiative.
The latter focuses on how themes such as the circular economy and the Fourth Industrial Revolution can be harnessed to create better cities. The Pentagon has been repaired, and a shiny, story World Trade Center now punctuates the skyline of Lower Manhattan, but not all wounds have healed.
Many others are living with the absence of the nearly 3, loved-ones who died during the attacks. When DHS began operations in , it was the largest U. As well, the recent withdrawal from Afghanistan was a reminder that long shadow of the attack is still influencing events today, even two decades later.
This article is published in collaboration with Visual Capitalist. The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.
US consumer prices have risen to their highest rate since , with consumer prices up 6. Economists say the inflation could be long-lasting. Similar abuses occurred in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where guards sexually abused and humiliated prisoners.
The moral stain from this era was so obvious that al-Qaeda in Iraq, the group that morphed into the brutal ISIS, later used the imagery against us—parading its own prisoners around in the orange jumpsuits from Gitmo. And yet American leaders continued to embrace the approach anyway. Military-commission proceedings for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, allegedly a mastermind of the attacks, and four co-defendants are still in a pretrial phase.
The trial might start next year—or sometime further in the future. In the meantime, the U. At home, we reorganized the government the wrong way. The CIA, NSA, and FBI had all overlooked pieces of the plot; bureaucratic inertia and interagency jealousy had prevented the sharing of intelligence that might have disrupted the looming attacks; the CIA had even known that two of the hijackers, known al-Qaeda operatives, were inside the United States. Certain aspects of the reorganization proved successful.
But the biggest change, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the largest government reorganization since World War II, has consistently proved to be a mistake. Congress shoehorned politically charged immigration and border-security agencies into the same department with uncontroversial emergency-management programs—a setup that left the latter neglected.
Unlike the Justice Department, it has no institutional culture rooted in respect for the rule of law. Homeland Security has helped set up scores of so-called state fusion centers, little-scrutinized entities that ostensibly promote intelligence sharing among multiple levels of government but, in practice, have targeted people, such as members of antiwar groups, who do not remotely qualify as terrorists.
The department has also accelerated the militarizing of local and state police departments, which recast themselves as potential front-line responders to terror attacks on the American homeland. Only the shock of that moment at a. One DHS section, the newly formed Customs and Border Protection, experienced a surge of growth so poorly executed that the agency became a major corruption threat in the region near the border with Mexico. New agents and officers were sent into the field before background checks were completed.
This mismatch of resources, training, and personnel helps explain why morale among DHS employees is far lower than in the federal government as a whole. Last summer, DHS agents and officers ran amok across the country following the protests around the murder of George Floyd. Federal officers snatched citizens off the street in Portland, Oregon, and hustled them into unmarked rental vans.
Such episodes reveal all too starkly the danger of creating a new law-enforcement bureaucracy at a moment of national anxiety, effectively enshrining fear into law forever. But nearly every step the U. The attacks put America and China on the same side of a new divide between the world of order and the world of disorder. Since the U. China and India would have risen as fast, if not faster. And North Korea would have been as far, if not farther along, in its ambitions, because China, given a more hostile relationship with the U.
I seriously doubt that George W. Bush would be president. September 11 prompted this housing boom. We would have seen a continuation of a slide throughout much of the next two years. America would be swimming in happiness. Kerry would be president. We would get to airports at the last minute, and the paranoia proportion would be lower. Daniel Pearl would still be alive. Francis Fukuyama would have beaten Samuel Huntington, who would be seen almost everywhere for the crypto-fascist that he is. History would be over.
The week would have seven Sundays. Writers would be writing novels; philosophers, philosophy. Wall Street would be touching the sky. Castro would still be the devil. Oliver Stone would have made a movie about a still-reigning Saddam Hussein. The superrich would be cooler, and more concerned with poverty in poor countries. Palestinians would have a state. Moderate Muslims would control the Islamic extremists. America would be less religious God help us!
And unsurprisingly, Patriot Act provisions have been used to prosecute a Las Vegas vice lord and interrogate a college death-penalty opponent in cases having nothing to do with terrorism. September 11 was a useful excuse. This was a constitutional shift waiting to happen. Efforts to reverse Roe v. Wade and roll back affirmative action and the separation of church and state would have been serious.
A President Bush who believes that terrorism must be fought by the president without oversight or check had to select Supreme Court nominees guaranteed to sanction that. Next: Frank Rich, Columnist. Grand neocon delusions would have remained dormant as Rumsfeld instead busied himself on his grandiose schemes for remaking the Pentagon, not the Middle East. Maybe, but once the inevitable attack came, they too would have won the war in Afghanistan—and, not being tied down in Iraq, maybe they would have made sure it stayed won rather than let the Taliban regroup in the ensuing years.
He would quickly sign on once Stone indicated his intention to make the movie in subtitled Spanish. Next: Leon Wieseltier, Literary Editor. America would have enjoyed the luxury of some more time in the post—Cold War, inward-looking, money-mad bliss. History had ended, remember?
But the bliss would have, in any event, been short-lived. The turbulence in the Islamic world; the fear of modernity and its great representative, the United States; the hatred of Israel—these were all waiting to explode. So was the North Korean nuclear gambit and the Iranian nuclear gambit: The world was, even then, a much more perilous place than many Americans, and many American policymakers, had wanted to know.
It was one of the cataclysmic days in our history, one of the great American experiences of the irreversibility of history. And even the president wants us to stay the same. Once again, this blessed country is weirdly detached from its own historical situation.
Next: Tom Wolfe, Novelist. By now a socialite would be any young woman who has appeared in three or more party pictures taken by Patrick McMullan for any of a dozen or so fat party-picture magazines. How cool would that have been?
Two historic pillars of the New York economy—shipping and garment manufacturing—would have vanished by now. There would be 40 empty piers on the Hudson River, and the only shipping would be an intrepid but decrepit aircraft carrier welded to a dock and turned into a museum. The big news, however, would be the surge in the number of Asian students, which might have rocketed upward by as much as 10 percent a year.
The city would have had two Republican mayors in a row for the first time in modern history. Next: Reverend Al Sharpton. Certainly we would not have had the Iraq war. That would have changed the lives of the soldiers who died.
Freddy Ferrer would have won the Democratic nomination and be the mayor. Race relations would be better under Ferrer. The attack and the fear it generated led to people returning in mass to faith, depending more on religion for guidance and protection, which gave a tremendous revival to those who in my judgment misuse their religious fervor.
Sometimes people can only find comfort by grabbing at something that promises stability. Next: Ron Suskind, Author. Probably not. The view was that Saddam Hussein could be made an example of, that he was an easy mark, and that that would shape global behavior and send a signal to anyone with the temerity to challenge us.
Meanwhile, the growth and violent intentions of Islamic fundamentalism would have reared their heads sometime in this period, whether last week or earlier. Bin Laden is as much an ideology as an individual at this point. And Al Qaeda can be patient, deliberative. Their surviving, along with their ideology, is a kind of victory. It grows on its own, with the exercise of U.
Next: Dan Doctoroff, Deputy Mayor. Dan Doctoroff deputy mayor of economic development and rebuilding. The transformation of lower Manhattan, the expansion the West Side, the extension of the 7 line, the Atlantic Yards, the list goes on and on. Back in , if you had walked one block in any direction from the World Trade Center, it was blighted. That is changing right now, as we speak.
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