I have watched the horrific events of last Tuesday and their aftermath from abroad, largely cut off from interaction with friends and colleagues, glimpsing the reaction in Ireland only through RT╔ Radio One and the Irish newspapers on the web.
The sight of the two aircraft searing the Twin Towers was as horrific as one can imagine followed by even greater horror, the collapse of the buildings carrying with them thousands of lives. There were the stories of phone calls from the hijacked planes with passengers saying their goodbyes, the terror on the streets of New York, the ludicrous early estimates of the death toll (five believed to have died), panic stories of other hijackings and bombings.
It was a day we will remember but was it a day that changed the world? Hardly. Those of us who were around in 1963 remember where we were when we heard President Kennedy had been assassinated. But that did not change the world. The Cuban Missile Crisis of two years earlier nearly did change the world but it didn't. For God's sake people thought at the time that the death of Princes Diana changed the world.
The only event to have changed the world in the last 50 years was the fall of the Berlin Wall. September 11, 2001, however horrific or however memorable, will not change the world as that did.
Unless ...
Unless it unleashes further horrors of even greater proportions and that it could do, yet.
Assaults by the US on perhaps the most vulnerable and impoverished state on the earth, Afghanistan, might yet unleash unimaginable abominations. One possibility is that it would provoke a fanatical uprising in Pakistan, which would see the installation of a fundamentalist government in a State with nuclear weapons. What then?
Or it could see Islamic fanatics acquiring nuclear weapons capacity through the black market in central Asia (there was a report over a week ago of nuclear weapons, formerly the property of the Soviet Union, being on offer in Georgia). Or they could acquire biological or chemical weapons. What then? What then especially if the Islamic world is inflamed by what is perceived as another assault by the West on them?
Other impressions of the week were of the feebleness of George Bush. It was almost embarrassing at times as he struggled to form sentences that made sense and often failed. The only reassurance his administration offered was the picture of him flanked by Colin Powell and Dick Cheney.
From abroad, the national day of mourning in Ireland seemed strange. The US did not shut down last Friday but, apparently, Ireland did. Sure the country shared the horror, sure there are special ties of history, commerce, culture, friendship and familiarity with New York. Sure there is terrible grief over the Irish people killed in the attacks. But closing down for a day when the US stays open?
What should we have done about the atrocities in Rwanda seven years ago? Yes, there are no ties of history, commerce, or friendship with Rwanda, and no Irish lives were lost but the scale of the savagery it experienced dwarfs what happened in New York and Washington. Instead of nearly 5,000 lives lost, as in the US, there were 800,000 people (Tutsis) savagely hacked to death in just 100 days. No national day of mourning then in Ireland or, come to think of it, anywhere else except Rwanda.
There was no worldwide coalition assembled to wreak retribution on the perpetrators of the genocide. Far from it. France sent an army into Rwanda which protected the perpetrators and we poured aid into camps in the Congo to which the perpetrators fled. And, oh yes, we harboured the perpetrators in Belgium, in France, in Italy and the US.
Jack Straw said in a television programme on Thursday last there was a lesson to be learnt from the resolute response by the British government to IRA terrorism. He talked of resoluteness - that was what was needed now. Resoluteness in the face of IRA terrorism? Was he out to lunch when the British government changed its attitude to dealing with the republican movement after the massive bombs in the financial area in London and in the centre of Manchester in 1996? And weren't they right to take the sting from terrorism by justice - to seek to establish arrangements in Northern Ireland that were fair?
Wouldn't that be a more appropriate response now to Islamic terror? To deal with the massive injustice done to the Palestinians, to stop the strangulation of the Iraqi people, to pull the rug from the squalid corrupt governments in several Middle East states, to deal with debt, with poverty, with exploitative trading relations and with refugees.
That might not stop the more fanatical of the terrorists but it would take the edge from the anger of much of the Islamic world. Unfortunately, the US is preparing to do quite the reverse - to inflict more horror on defenceless people. Will we have a national day of mourning when thousands of innocent Afghans and perhaps Iraqis, Sudanese and Libyans are massacred in the coming months?
The plans afoot seem not just further abominations but also perverse. From what has emerged about those who planned last Tuesday's atrocities, it is obvious they were scattered around the western world, including the US, and have been for years. It is reasonable to suppose there are more such "sleepers" and attacking Afghanistan will make no difference to them other than to steel their resolve to inflict yet more horror.
vbrowne@irish-times.ie