The real price of Sept 11 for America

In politics, timing matters. The first set of Bush tax cuts started in June 2001, only months before 9/11. The second was passed by Congress on May 25, 2003. It was timed only three weeks after Bush gave his "Mission Accomplished" speech on aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln - but before the Iraqi insurgency took off.

The simplest way for the US president and the Congress to begin to stabilize the debt in the coming decade would be to let all of the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule at the end of 2012, and to accelerate the exit strategies from Iraq and Afghanistan. But for political reasons, such measures are not viable.

The US debt is unsustainable in the long run. It is compounded by the fiscal impacts of an aging population and rising health care costs because both will continue to mount.

There was a great global outpouring of sympathy for the US after 9/11. However, as a new Pew survey indicates, many around the world turned against the US as the Bush administration pivoted from Afghanistan to Iraq, and American anti-terrorism efforts expanded.

Widespread anti-Americanism was pervasive in international public opinion throughout the Bush years, before fading significantly following the election of Obama. More recently, the ratings of Obama and the Congress have plunged after the US debt-ceiling debacle and the subsequent downgrading of US sovereign credit rating.

Today, again, perceptions of America and its role in the world are shifting abroad. The global financial crisis has led many to see the financially strapped US as a great power in decline.

The real price of 9/11 is not in the Al-Qaida terrorist attacks. Rather, it is in the massive economic burden that the post-9/11 years will cast over the aging Americans who have lost a substantial part of their savings, over middle-class Americans who are struggling to keep their homes, and over the young Americans whose unemployment will define a generation.

Rarely has a nation hoped for so much as in the fall of 2008, when Obama won the presidential election. And rarely has a nation felt so frustrated as now that much of Obama's political capital has dissolved.

The real legacy of 9/11 will be overcome, but only when America will no longer be divided. As former US president Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his farewell address in 1961, "this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience".

In the post-9/11 world, the economy was a secondary issue in Washington. In the emerging multipolar world, it should be the national priority.

The author is research director of International Business at the India, China and America Institute, an independent think tank based in the US, and a visiting fellow at Shanghai Institutes for International Studies.

(China Daily 09/14/2011 page17)