Many hawks in the United States now openly admit to a veneration of past empires, yet they seem to have absorbed the military lessons of imperialism to the exclusion of all else. I suspect that this is the reason that many in the British political establishment were so dismayed by the buildup to the Iraq war. They know all too well that an aura of legitimacy and consent is essential in matters of empire.
Legitimacy and the tactics of persuasion are obviously not high priorities for the Bush administration. But the task would be difficult anyway. In the nineteenth century, the apparatus of persuasion was effective partly because the colonizing force could exercise close control over the flow of information. In Iraq, every effort at persuasion will be offset by daily doses of dissuasion, delivered through the Internet and satellite television channels. The persuasive effectiveness of nineteenth-century empires also rested in large part on the talismanic role of science. Today high technology is too widespread to astonish. Although smart bombs are terrifying, they do not have the mystique that the Gatling gun once held.
The modern connotations of the word "empire" also show how the context of imperialism has changed. For many, especially in America, it is a reminder of an image that played a significant part in discrediting the Soviet Union: the "evil empire." This is not a purely rhetorical anxiety; the unease goes deeper than that. A substantial proportion of America's population remains unconvinced of the need to undertake a new version of a "civilizing mission." This is what distinguishes America from the imperial nations of the past.
As George Orwell and many other observers of imperialism have pointed out, empires imprison their rulers as well as their subjects. In today's United States, where people are increasingly disinclined to venture beyond their borders, this has already come to pass. But perhaps, in these accelerated times, it won't be long before most Americans begin to dream of an escape from the imprisonment of absolute power.
SEPTEMBER 11 2001
IN 1999, SOON AFTER MOVING to Fort Greene, in Brooklyn, my wife and I were befriended by Frank and Nicole De Martini, two architects. As construction manager of the World Trade Center, Frank worked in an office on the eighty-eighth floor of the north tower. Nicole is an employee of the engineering firm that built the World Trade Center, Leslie E. Robertson Associates. Hired as a "surveillance engineer," she was a member of a team that conducted year-round structural-integrity inspections of the Twin Towers. Her offices were on the thirty-fifth floor of the south tower.
Frank is forty-nine, sturdily built, with wavy salt-and-pepper hair and deeply etched laugh lines around his eyes. His manner is expansively avuncular. The Twin Towers were both a livelihood and a passion for him: he would speak of them with the absorbed fascination with which poets sometimes speak of Dante's canzones. Nicole is forty-two, blond and blue-eyed, with a gaze that is at once brisk and friendly. She was born in Basel, Switzerland, and met Frank while studying design in New York. They have two children — Sabrina, ten, and Dominic, eight. It was through our children that we first met.
Shortly after the basement bomb explosion of 1993, Frank was hired to do bomb-damage assessment at the World Trade Center. An assignment that he thought would last only a few months quickly turned into a consuming passion. "He fell in love with the buildings," Nicole told me. "For him, they represented an incredible human feat. He was awed by their scale and magnitude, by their design, and by the efficiency of the use of materials. One of his most repeated sayings about the towers is that they were built to take the impact of a light airplane."
On Tuesday morning, Frank and Nicole dropped their children off at school, in Brooklyn Heights, and then drove on to the World Trade Center. Traffic was light, and they arrived unexpectedly early, so Nicole decided to go up to Frank's office for a cup of coffee. It was about a quarter past eight when they got upstairs. A half-hour later, she stood up to go. She was on her way out when the walls and the floor suddenly heaved under the shock of a massive impact. Through the window, she saw a wave of flame bursting out overhead, like a torrent spewing from the floodgates of a dam. The blast was clearly centered on the floor directly above; she assumed that it was a bomb. Neither she nor Frank was unduly alarmed: few people knew the building's strength and resilience better than they. They assumed that the worst was over and that the structure had absorbed the impact. Sure enough, within seconds of the initial tumult, a sense of calm descended on their floor. Frank herded Nicole and a group of some two dozen other people into a room that was relatively free of smoke. Then he went off to scout the escape routes and stairways. Minutes later, he returned to announce that he had found a stairway that was intact. They could reach it fairly easily, by climbing over a pile of rubble.
The bank of rubble that barred the entrance to the fire escape was almost knee-high. Just as Nicole was about to clamber over, she noticed that Frank was hanging back. She begged him to come with her. He shook his head and told her to go on without him. There were people on their floor who had been hurt by the blast, he said; he would follow her down as soon as he had helped the injured.
Frank must have gone back to his office shortly afterward, because he made a call from his desk at about nine o'clock. He called his sister Nina, on West Ninety-third Street in Manhattan, and said, "Nicole and I are fine. Don't worry."
Nicole remembers the descent as quiet and orderly. The evacuees went down in single file, leaving room for the firemen who were running in the opposite direction. On many floors, there were people to direct the evacuees, and in the lower reaches of the building there was even electricity. The descent took about half an hour, and on reaching the plaza, Nicole began to walk in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge. She was within a few hundred feet of the bridge when the first tower collapsed. "It was like the onset of a nuclear winter," she said. "Suddenly everything went absolutely quiet and you were in the middle of a fog that was as blindingly bright as a snowstorm on a sunny day."
It was early evening by the time Nicole reached Fort Greene. She had received calls from several people who had seen Frank on their way down the fire escape, but he had not been heard from directly. Their children stayed with us that night while Nicole sat up with Frank's sister Nina, waiting by the telephone.
The next morning Nicole decided that her children had to be told that there was no word of their father. Both she and Nina were calm when they arrived at our door, even though they had not slept all night. Nicole's voice was grave but unwavering as she spoke to her children about what had happened the day before.
The children listened with wide-eyed interest, but soon afterward they went back to their interrupted games. A little later, my son came to me and whispered, "Guess what Dominic's doing?"
"What?" I said, steeling myself.
"He's learning to wiggle his ears."
This was, I realized, how my children — or any children, for that matter — would have responded: turning their attention elsewhere before the news could begin to gain purchase in their minds.
At about noon we took the children to the park. It was a bright, sunny day, and they were soon absorbed in riding their bicycles. My wife, Deborah, and I sat on a shaded bench and spoke with Nicole. "Frank could easily have got out in the time that passed between the blast and the fall of the building," Nicole said. "The only thing I can think of is that he stayed back to help with the evacuation. Nobody knew the building like he did, and he must have thought he had to."