I don’t talk about it much, but I was in downtown New York City on 9/11. It was the first day of class for that year at NYU, and I was living in a dorm downtown. After I saw the second plane hit the tower I knew something major was happening. So I grabbed my video camera and took the video above. Most of it records the hours and days after the attack, including attacks on Muslim businesses, one of which you can see in the video. Today I’m in Seattle after a trip through Canada – the first time in 20 years that I’ve been in the US on 9/11.
Everyone my age remembers where they were on 9/11, whether they were in New York or not. It was a formative experience for me, mostly because of the era of fear and jingoism that it started in the United States - something I write about in the prologue of my book The Owned Continent. There are not many singular events that change the direction of the world, but 9/11 is among them.
Europeans looked on with horror on that day. They didn’t just express sympathy, they put their money where their mouths were. On the morning of September 12, 2001, before the smoke over Manhattan had cleared, NATO’s ambassadors gathered in Brussels and did something they had never done in the alliance’s 52-year history: they invoked the Article 5 mutual defence clause. An attack on one, the article says, is an attack on all. For the first and only time since 1949, NATO declared that the “one” under attack was the United States. But the question over who attacked was more complicated. It was not a state, which NATO was designed to counteract (specifically, the Soviet Union). It was a terrorist group, Al Qaeda, which was being harboured by a non-recognised government in Afghanistan. Afghanistan did not attack America. Nevertheless, every European NATO member joined the United States in the Afghanistan War because of that Article 5 invocation.
It’s remembered today as a moment of solidarity – grieving allies standing shoulder to shoulder with a wounded friend. But the real story of why Article 5 was invoked, what Washington did with that solidarity, and what Europe got out of it, is more complicated and more interesting than the mythology suggests.