IP: NY Times: What will New York be like on Sept. 11, 2011?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
>
> [Note:  This item comes from reader Robert Berger.  DLH]
>
> At 9:51 -0800 12/10/01, Robert J. Berger wrote:
> > From: "Robert J. Berger" <rberger () ultradevices com>
> > To: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>,   Dewayne Hendricks 
> > <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> > Subject: NY Times: What will New York be like on Sept. 11, 2011?
> > Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 09:51:36 -0800
> > MIME-Version: 1.0
> >
> > [a bit pessimistic, but sobering]
> >
> > 2011
> > By NIALL FERGUSON
> > December 2, 2001
> > <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/02/magazine/02TENYEARS.html>
> >
> > Take the long view. What will New York be like on Sept. 11, 2011?
> > It's not difficult to imagine a rather wretched future. You need only
> > visit one of those cities -- Jerusalem or Belfast -- that have been
> > fractured by terrorism and religious strife to get a glimpse. Imagine
> > a segregated city, with a kind of Muslim ghetto in an outer borough
> > that non-Muslims can enter only -- if they dare -- with a special
> > endorsement on their ID cards. Imagine security checkpoints at every
> > tunnel and bridge leading into Manhattan, where armed antiterrorist
> > troops check every vehicle for traces of explosives and prohibited
> > toxins.
> >
> > Does that mean you also have to count on even worse gridlock on the
> > Van Wyck Expressway? No, because you also need to imagine a decline in
> > the number of cars on the road. For by 2011, the third and final oil
> > shock will have heralded the end of the internal-combustion era.
> >
> > Still, there will be some comfort to be found downtown. There, rising
> > like a phoenix from the rubble of the World Trade Center, will be that
> > gleaming monument to American resilience: the twin towers of the Nafta
> > Center. Even if world trade couldn't be rebuilt after the Great
> > Depression of 2002-03, at least the city's beloved landmark could. And
> > the new towers will be even taller -- thanks to the antiaircraft
> > turrets on top.
> >
> > In its immediate aftermath, the destruction of the World Trade Center
> > looked like one of those events -- the assassination at Sarajevo, the
> > bombing of Pearl Harbor -- that set history on a new course. Some
> > excitable commentators began talking about ''World War III'' almost
> > the same day the twin towers fell. That's one possible future. Much
> > more likely, however, is the nightmare scene sketched above. That's
> > because this outcome could arise out of already discernible trends,
> > all of which predated Sept. 11, 2001. Tragic and spectacular though it
> > was, that event was far less of a turning point than is generally
> > believed.
> >
> > We should be wary, in fact, of ever attaching too much importance to
> > any single event. It was not Gavrilo Princip alone who started World
> > War I. In his great novel, ''The Man Without Qualities,'' Robert Musil
> > dismissed the idea that history moves in a straight line like a
> > billiard ball, changing direction only when struck.  For Musil,
> > history was more like ''the passage of clouds,'' constantly in flux,
> > never predictable. That quality is what makes it impossible to predict
> > where exactly we will be 10 years from now.
> >
> > Yet Musil's analogy of history and clouds illuminates something
> > else. Though the weather is hard to forecast, the range of possible
> > weathers is not infinitely large. It may not rain tomorrow, but we
> > know that if it does, it will rain water, not boiling oil. It may not
> > be quite as warm as yesterday, but we know that it will not be minus
> > 50 degrees.
> >
> > In other words, Sept. 11 was the historical equivalent of a violent
> > and unpredictable storm. But the storm did not alter the fact that
> > summer was slowly shading into fall. In just the same way, the attacks
> > on New York and Washington, however shocking, did not alter the
> > direction of several underlying historical trends. In many respects
> > the world will not be so very different in 2011 from the world as it
> > would have evolved under the influence of those trends, even had the
> > attacks not happened.
> >
> > The first deep trend is obvious enough: the spread of terrorism --
> > that is to say the use of violence by nonstate organizations in the
> > pursuit of extreme political goals -- to the United States. This kind
> > of terrorism has been around for quite a while. Hijacking planes is
> > certainly not new: since the late 1960's, when the tactic first began
> > to be used systematically by the Palestine Liberation Organization and
> > its sympathizers, there have been some 500 hijackings. As for the
> > tactic of flying planes directly at populous targets, what else were
> > the 3,913 Japanese pilots doing who killed themselves and many more
> > American servicemen flying kamikaze missions in 1944 and 1945?
> >
> > All that was really new on Sept. 11 was that these tried-and-tested
> > tactics were applied in combination and in the United States. Between
> > 1995 and 2000, according to State Department figures, there were more
> > than 2,100 international terrorist attacks. But just 15 of them
> > occurred in North America, causing just seven casualties. It was the
> > successful extension of international terrorism to the United States
> > that was the novelty.
> >
> > A novelty, yes, but hardly a surprise. Terrorism had been a fact of
> > life in major cities around the world -- including New York's elder
> > sister London -- for decades. The only surprising thing was that New
> > York was spared for so long. Put it this way: if economics could be
> > globalized, why not political violence? The two are in fact
> > connected. Year after year it becomes easier for small bands of
> > fanatics to perpetrate mass destruction because the means of
> > destruction get cheaper and more readily available. The last time I
> > checked, a used AK-47 assault rifle could be purchased in the United
> > States for $700 and a new one for $1,395, almost exactly the price of
> > the portable computer on which this article was written.
> >
> > In the same way, the real cost of a nuclear warhead -- and certainly
> > the real cost of a kiloton of nuclear yield -- is lower today than at
> > any time since the Manhattan Project achieved its goal. That cost two
> > billion 1945 dollars. Converted into 2001 prices, that figure rises
> > roughly tenfold, which is enough to buy more than 400 Trident II
> > missiles. (Let's face it: if nukes were expensive, Pakistan wouldn't
> > have them.) It seems reasonable to assume that the same process has
> > reduced the cost of biological weapons like refined anthrax.
> >
> > The bad news is that no amount of warfare against the states that
> > harbor terrorists will rule out further attacks. The Western European
> > experience of combating leftist and nationalist terrorism shows that
> > the real war against terrorism has to be fought on the home front by
> > domestic intelligence agencies, police forces and humdrum security
> > guards around all potential targets.
> >
> > So, welcome to the world of the daily security check, the fortnightly
> > bomb scare and the annual explosion.  Ten years from now, New York
> > firefighters and Washington postal workers will feel the same weary
> > resignation that Londoners developed during the I.R.A.'s bombing
> > campaign.
> >
> >      he second trend that Sept. 11 did nothing to change is the
> > economic downturn. The asset bubble of the late 1990's peaked a year
> > and a half before the terrorists struck. And despite their proximity
> > to Wall Street, the real crashes of Sept. 11 did not cause a
> > metaphorical crash on the stock market -- just its temporary closure.
> >
> > Admittedly, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, investors had
> > to grit their teeth as prices threatened to go into free fall. Yet so
> > far, the deflation of the late 1990's asset price bubble has been a
> > gentle affair compared with the cataclysmic meltdown that followed the
> > bubble of the 1920's. To give some orders of magnitude, a crash on the
> > 1929-32 scale would take the Dow down from over 11,723 -- where it
> > stood at its peak in January last year -- to about 1,266 by November
> > next year. On Nov. 15, it stood at 9,872, less than 3 percent down
> > from Sept. 10. When Alan Greenspan coined the phrase ''irrational
> > exuberance,'' the index was 6,473. In this light, the most striking
> > thing about the economic consequences of Sept. 11 would seem to be
> > their insignificance. A 3 percent drop in the Dow is nothing. Oil
> > prices, too, have continued their yearlong decline. And there has been
> > virtually no movement in long-term interest rates, which might have
> > been expected at a time of increased political risk.
> >
> > Nevertheless, the world economy has two serious economic weaknesses --
> > also predating Sept. 11 -- that cannot be ignored.

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