Dispersing the Terrorist Storm
Ten years after 9/11, it is clear that the fanatics behind those attacks miscalculated in two central respects: They regarded Western democracies as weak – unwilling or unable to respond to their evil extremism – and they expected Muslim communities and countries around the world to rise up and mobilize behind their millenarian worldview.
WARSAW – On September 11, 2001 at three p.m., Warsaw time, I was talking on the telephone with Poland’s Consul General in New York. She informed me that two planes had hit the World Trade Center. That moment, I realized, was more than just a plane crash. The United States, the world, indeed our very lives, were about to change fundamentally.