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The Day
that Changed the World
By Michael Alan Hamlin
September 17, 2001
In business, it's called an inflection point. In politics,
it's called a revolution. In peacetime, it's called an atrocity.
These are the points in time where everything changes. Where what
came before was then, and what comes after is a way of life until
the next big event. Life changed last Tuesday. And not for the best.
I don't mean economically. While there will be economic
trouble, it won't last, and it won't be as bad as many predict.
Contrary to what many economists and analysts say they fear, a global
recession is not in the cards. The attack is already stimulating
unprecedented emergency government spending that will create both
jobs and opportunity. Congress is giving the Bush Administration
US$40 billion, twice the amount it requested, for both security
and humanitarian purposes. Although by some estimates US$30 billion
has been lost as a result of the tragedy, more will be spent bringing
it back, and then some. Unthinkable hardship will lead, perhaps
perversely, as it has before to economic salvation.
There will be tradeoffs. They will come in, among other
things, reduced tolerance, curtailed freedoms, and a decidedly belligerent
attitude toward any country and group that doesn't call itself an
ally. Americans themselves and America and its friends have been
brought closer together by adversity, and the desire to protect
shared values and ideals. Never before have those values and ideals
been as so visibly and physically under real and painful threat.
And never have they seemed so precious, or so worth the sacrifices
necessary to preserve them.
It's easy to be tolerant of divergent views and practices
when they represent relatively minor threats. But as we have found
out, the perception of security against threats can be harshly illusory.
While the scattered incidents of violence against U.S. residents
and even citizens of Middle East heritage and the symbols of their
spirituality and way of life since the attack are isolated instances
of misguided rage, America on the whole is going to be far more
intolerant against those who profess to be its enemies than ever
before.
That doesn't mean that America will just fight back.
It means that it will step up efforts in a frightful way to identify
and then neutralize threats before they are able to strike. Forget
the benefit of doubt. U.S. authorities will take pains to accurately
identify those responsible for Tuesday's attack before acting against
them. But future potential terrorist threats are unlikely to have
the luxury of incubation that Osama bin Laden has had.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said that
future U.S. military action against individuals, groups or nations
involved in Tuesday's terrorist attacks would be "self-defense.
I don't think of it as retaliation. I don't think of it as punishment,"
Rumsfeld told CNN's Larry King. "The United States has every
right to defend itself."
Likewise, that America is not obligated to wait for
an attack to come seems obvious. This is where the values and lifestyles
of Americans and those who live in America are likely to feel the
biggest impact of a changed perspective toward perceived threats,
and the willingness, or unwillingness, to tolerate them as a tradeoff
necessary to preserve a way of life.
Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law professor at
the University of Southern California Law School told Reuters last
Friday that the administration appears intent on tightening up on
civil liberties and increasing Internet wiretapping and monitoring
by law enforcement. He said, "all of that sentiment is very
dangerous at this point in time."
Mr. Chemerinsky doesn't think he has much chance of
holding back the tide, however, with emotions running high. "I
think there's going to be a real effort to give government more
surveillance authority," he explained. The concern of privacy
activists like Mr. Chemerinsky is not that government is listening
in on realistically potential threats, but that an administration
could use its expanded authority to eavesdrop for political or other
purposes.
"There will be a lot of data-collecting cloaked
in national security concern," said Lori Fena, chairman and
co-founder of Truste, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting
Web privacy. But she seems resigned to what many now consider inevitable:
"The use of the data should be restricted to security measures
and not used for other purposes," she said.
But the real change in America for those outside America
won't be whether more people are listening in on conversations,
electronic or otherwise. It will be America's hardened heart. As
one New Yorker said, "I hope we won't kill mothers and children,
but we have to get the people who did this." So if there's
a price to pay, let someone else pay it.
America as we knew it is gone. Already criticized for
its strengthened unilateral policymaking, America will increasingly
demonstrate little tolerance for perspectives not in its best interest,
and certainly not those that overtly threaten it, big or small.
Before last Tuesday, America was sensitive to potential charges
of exerting excessive force on smaller enemies.
Not any more.
(Mr. Hamlin is managing director of the consultancy TeamAsia
and the author of three books on Asian economies and managing in
Asia. His latest book is Marketing Places Asia, which
is coauthored. His e-mail address is mahamlin@teamasia.com.ph.
If you use a Smart/Talk N Text GSM user, you can text a message
to Mr. Hamlin's mailbox by typing the keyword mikehamlin and sending
it to 200.)
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