The world trembles

terrorist blows to the heart of fortress America, as STEPHEN LEWIS reports.

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 will go down as one of the infamous dates in 21st century history - a day when old certainties crashed around the eyes and ears of the USA and the free, democratic world. Comparisons with Pearl Harbour are not misplaced, says York MP Hugh Bayley. "I think it is that serious," he says. "If there was a nation state claiming responsibility for this, the United States would be at war. The fact that it was not a nation state highlights the sort of security risk that countries face these days.

"People breathed a sigh of relief at the end of the cold war, and rightly, too. But in many ways there is more uncertainty now than there was then."

It will take time for the full scale of what happened - and for the implications it may have for the way we all live our lives - to sink in.

First and foremost what happened in New York and Washington yesterday is a human tragedy on an unprecedented scale.

It was so appalling that as it unfolded on our TV screens it simply didn't seem real to those who followed it on breaking news bulletins throughout the day.

When Lawrence Rainey, York University's American professor of English Literature, rang his mother Emma in Chicago at about 2pm yesterday our time - it was 8am in Chicago and 9am in New York - he wanted simply to discuss her planned visit to the UK.

Instead, he found his mother in a state of shock. "She said 'you won't believe what's happened'," he said. "She said 'I'm watching it on the TV. A plane has just flown into the World Trade Centre. I just can't believe what I am seeing." Neither, when he rushed to catch the news coverage here, could her son.

"I was tremendously shaken," he said, sounding on the verge of tears. "It was like a tawdry political thriller suddenly coming real." What makes Prof Rainey so upset is the way that innocent people - people who had never done anything to harm anyone - were the ones singled out by terrorists as the victims. The World Trade Centre, in which 50,000 people a day worked, was not a government building, he said - they were offices, filled with ordinary people working mainly in trade, imports and exports.

"I've had many a lunch in that building," said Prof Rainey. "At least ten times, as has my wife. My wife used to import wines into the US and she would always meet people there. It could have been me, it could have been her, it could have been anybody.

"I'm caught between a sense of wanting to cry and at the same time feeling a sense of rage at such tremendous barbarism. There's also great sadness that human beings could be so inhumane to each other and show such a lack of respect for the sanctity of life. We could be talking about thousands of people."

The initial reaction of millions of Americans, at home and abroad, will be one of shock and bewilderment, Prof Rainey believes. That, and a feeling of terrible vulnerability.

It is a feeling that will be shared by many of the democratic nations of the free world.

Because if ever there had been any doubts about the extremes to which international terrorists would go in pursuit of their aims, yesterday's terrible events have laid them to rest.

Warnings about international terrorist organisations or 'rogue states' being the new great threat to world stability suddenly seem less sensationaly. Now, schemes such as George W Bush's Son of Star Wars missile defence system begin to seem a little less foolish.

Except that, whatever its merits as a defence against nuclear attack, such a system could not have protected America against the kind of terrorist attack launched against it yesterday. Nothing could have prevented such an attack.

Prof Rainey cannot understand how such a massive security breach could have been possible in a country like the USA.

But he agrees that people in the West simply cannot understand the sense of desperation and the 'utter and reckless disregard for human life' that made suicide bombings of the kind seen yesterday possible.

So how to defend against such fanaticism? The solution, Mr Bayley believes, is for closer co-operation between the world's democratic states, not less - more dialogue, including with Arab countries, and more intelligence sharing in an attempt to beat the terrorists.

"There has clearly been a major breakdown in security in the US," he says. "But any country, including Britain, could have suffered in the same way. We have to review our defences and security procedures to build defences against this sort of attack. But to do that, we need to co-operate with other nations."

The biggest worry is that as the initial shock over yesterday's atrocity begins to subside, it will be replaced by anger.

What happened must not be allowed to lead to increased international tension or to undermine democracy and personal freedom, says Mr Bayley - and it must not be used as an excuse for racial or religious bigotry.

"There is a risk that to protect ourselves against terrorism we will undermine the freedoms that we enjoy," he says. Then it becomes these freedoms themselves that are under attack by the terrorists." Tightening up security in the immediate aftermath of the atrocity in an attempt to prevent anything similar happening again will be inevitable, he says.

But to allow ourselves to become a society crippled by fear, in which our every move is monitored by security services and subjected to rigorous checks, would be to allow the terrorists to win.

It would mean we had "lost the battle for freedom and democracy".

Nor should yesterday's events be used as an excuse for religious or racial bigotry, he says. Nobody knows yet just who was responsible for the outrage - but the first thought in many people's minds will be that it must have been the work of Middle East terrorists.

Even if that were to prove the case, says Mr Bayley, that would be no excuse for a backlash against ordinary, law-abiding Moslems - in this country or anywhere else.

"The vast numbers of good, law-abiding moslems, in this country and elsewhere, are not in any sense to blame, and will be as horrified as anyone else by what has happened," he says.

As the world wakes up to a new era of uncertainty, that is a truth we need to cling to.

Updated: 10:10 Wednesday, September 12, 2001