September 11, Crisis Resolution

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Posted August 23, 2002
By Pamela Harris

BOOK CHAPTER-CAUSES OF
TERRORISM

From the book "Terrorism: Concepts, Causes, and Conflict Resolution" (ed. by LTC R. Scott Moore [USMC], ICAR Ph.Dstudent)

Dennis Sandole, Prof. of Conflict Resolution and International Relations

Introduction

In the film, "Seven," with Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Kevin Spacey, and Gwyneth Paltrow, Kevin Spacey plays a serial murderer who, when asked by detective Brad Pitt why he has committed a series of ghastly murders, replies, "Sometimes you have to hit people on the side of the head with a sledge hammer to get their attention!"

Clearly, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 constitute such a hit on the head for Americans. For a country that contributed significantly to ending the Holocaust, launched the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II, prides itself on occupying the "moral high ground" in international affairs and which Francis Fukuyama (1989, 1992) proclaimed the victor in the ideological clash between democracy and communism, it was a double shock, on top of the traumatizing collapse of the World Trade Center, that the 19 men who overtook the four airlines with box cutters to turn them into cruise missiles, could have hated the U.S. that much.

How could that be? What could the U.S. have possibly done to incur such wrath, leading to the deaths of thousands and a pervasive sense of insecurity among Americans the likes of which have not been seen since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963?

Asking the questions is easy. The hard part is in recognizing that, in our outrage and anger, grieving and mourning, and in general, shock, the last thing that many of us want to hear is "analysis." However, if we want to win the "War on Terrorism," then I am afraid that analysis is where we must begin.

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