AA Edit | Has America Lost Goodwill Of World?

We are all Americans. “Nous sommes tous Américains”. The headline of the editorial on Le Monde, France’s No. 1 newspaper, the day after the September 11 attacks in the United States proclaimed these words. It was in solidarity with a wounded nation, and a wounded people, a feeling the whole world wanted to communicate with those who were the worst victims of terrorism during those times.

And that feeling was justified. In coordinated attacks on the iconic World Trade Center twin towers and the Pentagon, 19 terrorists of Al Qaeda killed close to 3,000 people and forever shattered thousands of lives. Geopolitics, too, changed forever. West Asia and Afghanistan were never going to be the same again. The everyday lives of ordinary people there, and indeed everywhere, including Americans, changed into a different perceptual and security gear from then on, with fear being its most critical part.

That the terrorists have not been able to repeat their misdeed on the same scale is marked as a success in the efforts of the global community as well as the United States, and it is a well-deserved achievement for humanity. However, it has come with a price paid by all communities and all nations.

Yet today it is up to the US to decide if it has since repaid the camaraderie and goodwill shown to it by the world in its moments of crisis. History must have recorded how it has destabilised governments, attacked civilisations and shattered the balance of friendships that existed among countries when it prosecuted this act by waging what it called the “war on terror”. And it continues to send its armadas to distant lands for purposes its government can hardly explain; bombing and killing innocent people in their hundreds; and for a change, wrecking its own alliances with their governments for reasons that are hard to fathom.

And thus it is that it is up to the US, too, to observe and understand exactly why there are no editors today, or citizens from other nations for that matter, either, who are standing up in sorrow and outrage and proclaiming, “We are all Americans”, even though the wounds of that tragedy 25 years ago still fester.