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We are seven years away now from the incineration of the Twin Towers when, in one blow, 19 radical
religious zealots with a memory for Crusades and hatred for the United States turned the world upside
down. Or we did. It’s very hard to tell seven years later who really did more of the turning.

What specific concerns drove these men to the point where they would give up their own lives just to
injure ours is hard to tell. Few asked, and fewer still seemed to care. In the midst of national grief—and
for many, anger — all that mattered, apparently, was who to strike in retaliation. Anybody would do it,
it seemed. And so we did.

The world needn’t have changed the day the Towers went down or even, perhaps, with the military
attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan. It certainly changed, however, on the day when, without clear
proof of Iraq’s involvement, without undeniable certainty, without the approval of most of the world,
the United States roared over Iraq on bombing raids and rolled into Baghdad to tear down the statue of
Saddam Hussein.

On that day — not long after the whole world had grieved with us over the merciless loss of 3,000
innocent U.S. lives — the world divided in its loyalties, most of them against us.

Now the United States, once the most open country in the world, has become a country under siege.
Now we make 80-year-old widows and 6-year-old boys take off their shoes in our airports to make sure
they are not carrying explosives designed to harm us again. Now we have been longer at war with the
ghosts of these 19 men than we were with Nazi Germany in World War II. Now we have become
invaders, torturers, paranoid partners in global destabilization. The people who would “meet us with
flowers singing in the streets” have left us with more than 30,182 wounded, many of them permanently
disabled, and more than 4,150 dead.

Flush with weapons, we are now too poor to afford education grants or social security or universal
medical insurance. Now we, too, pick up people in grand random sweeps, call them terrorists, hold
them without charge, detain them with lawyers, cage them like animals, and fight with one another
over whether or not we are a “Christian” country. If it weren’t so sad, it would be funny. But it’s not.

We have changed the globe; divided it into armed and arming camps. We have accelerated a new kind
of arms race with smaller countries of the world intent now on getting nuclear weapons themselves.
After all, aren’t we the ones who made the concept of “Mutually Assured Destruction” the ultimate
defense strategy?

We have changed the Constitution (or ignored it) to allow domestic spying. We have changed the
country: stripped it of its liberties and enlarged the powers of the administration to such an extent
that we face the prospect of being governed more by the king of a republic than by the president of a
democracy. But worst of all, perhaps, we have traded in “America the Beautiful”—whom much of the
world revered, or at least respected — for America the Brutal, whom the world now mistrusts. Now we
have really given the radicals something to fight about. Indeed, the anniversary of 9/11 is a sad day for
peacemakers, not unlike the crucifixion when the work of a lifetime seems lost.

At the same time, it may be one of the most glorious moments in the history of peacemaking. There is
in it the resurrection of an idea: There is no glory in war. And more, there is no victory in it either.
There is only the silence of the innocent dead in a cause without a cause.

The Twin Towers are not the only thing that went down seven years ago. What went down is the soul
of a country that once put principle over power. Is such a country Christian? Only if it, too, rises from
the values that have died with it. And soon.

– an updated version of a commentary on 9/11 by Joan Chittister that appeared in Sojourners,
September-October, 2006