Nuclear weapons, it seems, were sent down here to provide mankind with a succession of unbearable dilemmas. And we should say at this point that the West’s anti-proliferation policy is a moral and philosophical non-starter. When the Administration talks of depriving Iran of nuclear weapons by means of (new-generation) nuclear weapons, we may wonder how convincing this will sound to a country whose core dread is invasion (they have suffered it from the Greeks, the Parthians, the Arabs, the Mongols, the Afghans, the Turks, the Russians, and the British) and whose core value is universal equality and justice.

  The solution is both entirely obvious and entirely unattainable. We must give the Iranians some face; and then all seven nuclear powers must begin to scale back toward the zero option; and the Middle East must be declared a nuclear-free zone. Many Israeli patriots now wish that the Jewish state had been established, not in Palestine, but in, say, Bavaria. Who would worry about a few leather-shorted scoutmasters from the BLO? As it is, Israel has Ahmadinejad to worry about. He may delegate First Use to Hezbollah or, perhaps, to the Call of Islam or the Legion of the Pure. Or he may himself choose to become the first suicide-bomber to be measured in megatons.

  JUNE 2006. The New York Times Syndicate

  What Will Survive of Us

  At 8:21 the first plane, American 11, turned off its transponder (the automatic tracking device); then it changed course and began its descent. The air traffic controllers were still trying to locate American 11 when word came through that “a light plane” had hit the World Trade Center (at 8:46). On CNN they saw the scene of the crash. The wound in the building’s side was in the shape of a plane; and they knew at once that it wasn’t a Cessna or a twinprop. It was what they call a “heavy”—a wide-body commercial jet.

  In the real-time docudrama United 93, we see the second plane strike its target, not on CNN, but, so to speak, with the naked eye. What appears to be the original footage, startlingly, has been placed within a vast vista of morning blue. Our POV is the glass-skinned control post at Newark International. By now the North Tower, to the right, is like a demonic smokestack, giving off a leaning column of furry black fumes. As the second plane (United 175) impends, the controllers gasp at its velocity. Muhammad Atta’s incision, in the North Tower, will now look surgically discreet—compared to the kinetic ecstasy sought by Marwan al-Shehhi. United 175 was traveling at nearly 600 mph, a speed that the 767 was not designed to reach, let alone sustain. This happened eleven seconds and three minutes after nine o’clock—the core moment of September 11. Now they knew; and so, about thirty minutes later, did the passengers on United 93.

  That plane, too, was traveling at 580 mph when it crashed, nose first and upside down, forming a crater 175 feet deep in an empty field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Of the three thousand who died on that day, only those on board the fourth plane had no doubts about the fate intended for them. The director of United 93, Paul Greengrass, is right: they were “the first people to inhabit the post-9/11 world.” We may strongly identify with one passenger, an earnest Scandinavian, who cannot accept the new reality: he argues for full cooperation with the hijackers, hoping, one assumes, for a leisurely siege on some sweltering North African tarmac. The others know, from cellphones and airphones, that it isn’t going to be like that. They rise up, and the plane comes down. United 93 took off at 8:42; the hijack began at 9:28; the passengers and crew started making their calls at about 9:35; the revolt was launched at 9:57; United 93 hit the ground at 10:03:11—one hour (to the second) after the crash of United 175.

  As the film nears its conclusion you will find yourself, I am confident, in a state of near-perfect distress—a distress that knows no blindspots. The New York Times called United 93 “the feel-bad movie of the year.” This description is trivial. The distress is something you can taste, like a cud, returned from the stomach for further mastication: the ancient flavor of death and defeat. You think: this is exactly what they meant us to feel. And your mind will cast about for something, a molecule, an atom of consolation; and what you will reach for is what the passengers reached for.

  Those that go through mortal fear also experience a fierce adoration of life—just as the prisoner on death row finds water delicious, finds air delicious. And before battle a soldier’s heart is said to be full of love. This somber, end-time love is not usually articulated; its articulation, on the planes of September 11, was made possible by that gigantic contributor to our daily reality, the mobile phone. Like the victims on the other three planes, but unlike them (because they knew that many, many hundreds of their compatriots had already died on that morning), the passengers called their families and said that they loved them. In retrospect it feels like an extraordinary validation, or fulfillment, of Larkin’s lines at the end of “An Arundel Tomb” (1956):

  …to prove

  Our almost-instinct almost true:

  What will survive of us is love.

  A Hollywoodized version of the story would begin with Bruce Willis, in the part of Todd Beamer(“Let’s roll”), waking in Manhattan, and languidly reminding his wife that he is off to San Francisco on an early flight from Newark. United 93 begins with the desolate, self-hypnotizing drone of early-morning prayer. In their budget hotel room the four hijackers, wearing clean white vests, are aspiring to the murderous serenity urged on them by their handlers in Afghanistan. Soon they are among the passengers and are being processed to the gate. We are in the familiar, and suddenly painful, everyday: the spotty young woman with her laptop; the shared travel anxiety of an elderly couple; the grunt of relief from a panting young man, pleased, as you would be, to get there just in time. And it is here, in the departure bay, that Greengrass makes his one major divergence from the known: Ziad Jarrah, the pilot and leader (and in all senses a different breed from the muscle Saudis), says six words into his mobile phone—“I love you. I love you.”

  Greengrass may have other sources. According to a footnote in The 9/11 Commission Report, Jarrah did make a final call to his fiancée, Aysel Senguen; but he called her from the hotel, and she described their conversation as brief and not unusual. Thus the moment in the departure bay, though broadly justifiable, is hugely anomalous, and for this reason: it is artistic. And elsewhere, while Greengrass cannot banish his talents of eye and ear, he refuses the artistic, and quite rightly. Those six words hang in the air, and are balanced and answered by the tearful protestations of the doomed passengers. In this reading, Jarrah, too, knew what would survive of him.

  What is not in doubt is that Jarrah loved Aysel Senguen. He is, by many magnitudes, the least repulsive of the nineteen killers of September 11. An affluent Lebanese, he left the beaches and discos of Beirut at the age of twenty-one, in 1996, and went to Germany to study dentistry (he later switched to aeronautics). There he met and fell in love with Aysel Senguen, the student daughter of a Turkish immigrant. He was human in other ways. Defying cadre policy, he stayed close to his family, and made several returns to the bedside of his ailing father in Lebanon. Most centrally, he had doubts, and needed to be cajoled and rallied right to the end. And all this is there in the extraordinary performance of Khalid Abdalla. There are no weak points, and no obtrusively strong points, in the United 93 ensemble. But among the little-knowns and the unknowns and the people playing themselves, Abdalla, perhaps destabilizingly for the movie, is something like its star. His history is all held in, yet it is all there in his suffering eyes.

  At Newark International there was a routine—indeed wholly predictable—delay on the ground, caused by weight of traffic. It is likely that those twenty-five minutes changed everything. If United had left on time, the chances are that there would have been no passenger revolt. Instead, there would have been horror at the White House or horror at the Capitol. Osama bin Laden wanted the White House; Muhammad Atta, the operational leader, vaguely argued that the approach to Pennsylvania Avenue would be too difficult, and wanted the Capitol. Interestingly, the President was not in the White House (he was puzzling his way through “The Pet Goat” in Sarasota, Florida), but the President’s wife might well have been in the Capitol (pushing No Child Left Behind). In any case, both buildings were being evacuated by 9:30—two minutes after the hijack of United 93.

  Greengrass peels off, at punctual intervals, to follow the traffic controllers (whose efforts were impressive) and to follow the military (whose efforts were pitiable); but by now the other three planes have crashed, and the focus is all on United 93. Sickening suspense about the revolt of the terrorists is replaced, hereafter, by sickening suspense about the revolt of the passengers. In the aftermath of that day, a CIA official tastefully noted that—even though the government spent $40 billion a year on internal security—all that stood between America and September 11 was “a bunch of rugby players.” But America didn’t even have that. On United 93 there is no bunch, no pack, of rugby players. There is one huge athlete who spearheads the charge (with a marvelously giddy, drunken expression on his face); but he leads a motley band—they are just passengers, after all. The looming countercoup is rendered in strict accordance with Greengrass’s method. There is no final powwow, there are no husky valedictions. It simply erupts, with desperate suddenness, and they are coming down the aisle with their weapons—kitchen knives, wine bottles, boiling water.

  And they didn’t really have a chance. This was one of the existential nightmares of United 93. They were up in the sky at maximum throttle in a huge machine. But no one on board knew how to land it. Not Jarrah, who was trained only for level flight. By now the passengers are using the drinks cart as a battering-ram, and Jarrah, lover of Aysel Senguen, is doing what he can to make the plane yaw, then pitch, then dive. These are the last words on the black box, translated from the Arabic, each and every one of them utterly futile, and utterly meaningless: “Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Is that it? I mean, shall we put it down?” “Yes, put it in it, and pull it down.” We can say, at least, that the passengers saved America from a fourth scar on its psyche. And there is that glimmer of double meaning in the film’s title. And that is all.

  Greengrass doesn’t spare us—but he spares us something. When was the last time you boarded an airplane that had no children in it? United 93 has no children in it. It is hard to defend your imagination from such a reality (and the Internet will not willingly tell you about the children on the planes of September 11). “What’s happening? Well, you see, my child, the men with the bloodstained knives think that if they kill themselves, and all of us, we will stop trying to destroy Islam and they will go at once to a paradise of women and wine.” No, I suppose you would just tell him or her that you loved them, and he or she would tell you that they loved you too. Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black. We can’t tell if it will survive us. But we can be sure that it’s the last thing to go.

  JUNE 2006. The Times

  Review of United 93, directed by Paul Greengrass (Universal Pictures, 2006)

  Conspiracy Theories, and Takfir

  The Frankfurter Zeitung repeats again and again that the Protocols are [sic] forgeries,” wrote Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf (1924). He meant The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to be the minutes of a conference held by a coven of power-crazed old Jews, and was in fact the inflammatory concoction of the Okhrana, or the tsarist secret police. “This alone,” Hitler went on, with a little cluck of satisfaction, “is evidence of their authenticity.”

  Readers should now prepare themselves for an orgy of credulousness. Asked in a recent survey to explain their presence in Iraq, 85 percent of American soldiers said that the “main mission” was “to retaliate for Saddam’s role” in the September attacks. About two-thirds of American civilians, it’s true, share that misapprehension; but it is implausible that front-line troops are so incuriously risking their lives. This near-consensus on the question cannot be due to ignorance. It comes from the same wishfulness that fortifies the majority belief, among Muslims, that September 11 was the work of Mossad (and that July 7, 2005, was the work of the French—incensed by losing out to Britain in their bid for the Olympics).

  Although few Americans think the Israelis were responsible for September 11, nearly half of them (42 percent) think the Americans did it. This means that the average American is slightly more distrustful of the U.S. government than the average Pakistani (in Pakistan a mere 41 percent consider that the attacks were not carried out by Islamic terrorists—as against 59 percent of Turks and Egyptians and 65 percent of Indonesians). American “skeptics” hold that the collapse of the Twin Towers was caused by expert demolition. They hold that the explosion at the Pentagon was consistent, not with a crashed 767, but with a cruise missile. In other words, Washington wounded itself.

  It is of course miserably predictable that there is, in the U.K., a thriving counter-theory about July 7. My pen grows heavy in my hand (and I begin to weary of the sun), but here it is: in order to “distract” the “public” from its other “crimes,” the “government” committed four massacres on that day, and “blamed” them on Islam. The July 7 pipedreamers, at their meetings and rallies, take a violent tone, and are quick to issue death threats to their opponents in blogsville; but on the front where terror and boredom march in step, the illusionists’ first loyalty is to tedium. “We just want you to weigh the evidence,” they say. In other words, they just want you to sit still and listen to an epic of futile pedantry. The bores, and the terrorists, are alike confessing to impotence. If realpolitik is all smoke and mirrors and supercynicism, then why not embrace marginality, and exclude yourself from the political and the real?

  Psychiatrists call it fabulation. The rest of us call it the conspiracy theory—or the masochistic lust for chicanery and compound deceit. Fabulation may more simply be the failure to assimilate; and we concede that September 11 will perhaps never be wholly assimilable. The first question to be asked of the fabulist is cui bono? And the answer would be, “Well, the Administration, which could then accrue the power…to march on Baghdad.” We are arriving at an axiom in long-term thinking about international terrorism: the real danger lies, not in what it inflicts, but in what it provokes. Thus by far the gravest consequence of September 11, to date, is Iraq.

  The American death toll in the war will soon exceed the death toll in the original assault; and for the Iraqi people, now, that figure is exceeded every three weeks. Nor are the losses merely actuarial: they are also to be seen in our enfeebled hold on the high ground of morality and reason. It is as if September 11 brought about a net increase in suggestibility, and at every level. At the top, a president who assigns himself the unusually bold project of “remaking” the Middle East, and thus the world; at the bottom, a citizenry haunted by rudderlessly cruising suspicion. The fact is that America didn’t wound itself in September 2001, as the fabulists claim. It did that in March 2003, and thereafter.

  In The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright’s tough-minded and cussedly persistent narrative opens with portraits of the grand triumvirate of developed Islamism: Sayyid Qutb, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Osama bin Laden. And almost at once the question arises: Should we be solaced, or additionally galled, by the poverty of the human material now so ferociously ranged against us? In these pages we meet some formidable schemers and killers, like Khaled Sheikh Muhammad, the author of “the Planes Operation” (and since imprisoned). As for the other players, there are nuances, there are shades of black; but the consistent profile is marked by intellectual vacuity, by a fanaticism that simply thirsts for the longest possible penal code, and, most basically, by a chaotically adolescent—or even juvenile—indifference to reality. These men are fabulists crazed with blood and death; and reality, for them, is just something you have to maneuver around in order to destroy it.

  Qutb (1906–66), an Egyptian writer and civil servant, does duty as the first framer of Islamism. And you wonder about the condition of the Muslim imagination, so easily “captured” by this almost endearingly comical blunderer. His fate, at the hands of Nasser, was not at all comical; and Qutb’s martyrdom was his controlled historical time bomb. Islamism, at any rate, owes to him the twin dreams of planetary domination and theocratic genocide. Zawahiri, Qutb’s compatriot, gives further weight to the argument that what they call IT (international terrorism) was born and raised in the prisons of Cairo. Torture is always the first recourse of a terrorized state (even Ted Heath reached for it early on in the Troubles). And in a sense terrorism is a gamble on torture. Will torture deter—or will it further radicalize? It further radicalized Zawahiri.

  Originally a medical man, Zawahiri became the leader and moral tutor of his own chapter of Islamism, al-Jihad, where he deployed the doctrine or heresy (or tinkertoy sophistry) of takfir. As Wright deftly explains,

  The takfiris convinced themselves that salvation for all of humanity lay on the other side of moral territory that had always been the certain province of the damned. They would shoulder the risks to their eternal souls by assuming the divine authority of deciding who was a real Muslim and who was not, who should live and who should die.