Bin Laden's Death a Signpost of Better Things to Come

At 9:30 on the morning of September 11, 2001, I was standing near the corner of Battery Place and West Street with the employees we had evacuated from our office at 17 Battery after a second plane hit the World Trade Center. Looking up at the flames in the windows at the top of 2 World Trade, I couldn’t imagine how such a large fire that far above the ground could be extinguished.  I believed the towers would burn to the ground, causing a massive disruption to communications and transportation in lower Manhattan. I gave an order to bring up our firm's disaster recovery site in East Rutherford, NJ, not giving much thought to how any of us would get there.

Instead, my mind raced forward thinking about what else this meant. I assumed there would be a fierce American response to this attack on our country. I also assumed the people who planned the WTC attack expected that, and had also planned counterattacks that would be no less devastating that this one. I thought I was witnessing the start of a state of war that would continue indefinitely, and that feeling came into sharp focus during the pandemonium that followed the collapse of the towers. Walking into Brooklyn with my colleagues over the Manhattan Bridge, I looked back in disbelief at the smoke rising from the site of the former World Trade Center and feared this might be the beginning of the end for New York. I pictured life becoming like that in certain Middle Eastern cities, where suicide bombers and attacks by armed insurgents are a common occurrence.

As it turned out, I should not have doubted our city’s ability to recover. In the days immediately following 9/11, the people of New York, with help from others all over the country, pulled together to overcome the aftermath of the attack. Incredible effort was coordinated to reconnect the utility infrastructure of lower Manhattan. When the markets came back up, there was a lot of volatility for the first few weeks, but things stabilized after that. (A few months later, it would take Enron and MCI to do to the economy what Osama could not.)

The American government acted swiftly and responsibly in pursuing the 9/11 perpetrators into Afghanistan. Although we are still faced with the challenge of ensuring political stability to avoid that country once again becoming a haven for terrorists, the actions of the U.S. military, our intelligence and domestic security agencies, have been effective in limiting Al Qaeda’s ability to mount new operations.

It’s important that Osama bin Laden has been brought to justice, but I don't have a particular feeling of vengeance or victory. New York and the U.S. won years ago when we recovered from 9/11. Al Qaeda turned out not to have been organized or financed well enough to sustain a terrorist war fought on American soil. Its methods were not effective in achieving any of its stated objectives.

The popular uprisings now unfolding in the Middle East have more potential to improve relations between the United States and the Muslim world than the death of bin Laden. Much of Al Qaeda's wrath towards the United States was redirected anger from political and economic inequalities in countries like Yemen, Egypt, Syria, and Bahrain. Now that Osama bin Laden is off the scene, revolutions in those countries are more likely to develop into democracies than fundamentalist theocracies. In fact, Al Qaeda's “solution” to oppression in the Middle East now seems completely outdated, lacking both the vision and the courage of today's Middle Eastern revolutionaries. Coming at this moment in history, Osama bin Laden's death may be the end of a tragic story, but hopefully will also be part of the beginning of a better one.