Column: Turning Points

This column is not about war, except inasmuch as everything, anymore, seems to be about war. It may be about history or physics. I'm not really sure.

Immediately after Sept. 11, I am ashamed to say I felt slightly cheated. It was the most shockingly important day of my life, and rather than dodging debris and saving lives in New York, I spent it a thousand miles away, taking a quantum mechanics pop quiz and watching the TV with passive horror. History has happened, I thought guiltily, and I've missed it. By Thursday of that surreal week, it had finally dawned on me that actually, I hadn't missed it. Because in a terrifyingly real sense, it wasn't over. It never is. Still, it took me a full 48 hours to grasp what my brain had theoretically known since my first decent history class: History happens all the time, and except for a few dramatic occasions, we don't notice it until long afterward.

The canonical view of history loves turning points. It delights in singling out rulers - this Roman emperor, that American president - whose regimes, in hindsight, held either the inauspicious beginning of a glorious triumph or the first vague inklings of defeat and ruin. Some scholars would call this view overdeterministic. But flawed or not, it holds tremendous appeal, particularly now, when potential turning points seem to loom around every corner.

After my realization on Sept. 13, I fell into an intellectual funk. The reason wasn't hard to find. John Adams said, "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy." Eventually, he continued, his sons' sons might earn the right to study painting, poetry and music. I'm not sure where physics fits in that progression, but I do know it seemed horribly irrelevant in the weeks after Sept. 11. Modern Rome had been attacked, and I couldn't face fiddling with quantum mechanics while it burned.

A year and a half later, and in the midst of war, I am back to fiddling again. In that respect, Sept. 11 wasn't a turning point at all. Ironically, however, the hope that it might become one was what drew me out of my funk. For a shining moment that fall, I hoped tragedy might spark a national soul-searching and show us how Rome should deal justly with its neighbors.

I thought American isolationism might yield to a new understanding of the need for international law. I thought our suffering might make us sympathetic to the thousands who die every day, unheralded and unmourned because the agents of their destruction are machetes and disease, not weaponized airliners. And I thought our government might use the world's overwhelming goodwill to build a better society. I was a fool.

Instead, we are dropping bombs on yet another third-world nation, the world hates us and the possible turning points have taken on a sinister cast. I would love to be wrong. I would love for future historians to look back on March 19 as the first day of a new Golden Age, an era in which a free Iraq paved the way for a just, democratic peace in the Middle East and the world. If I live long enough to see that happen, I will be the first to thank God I was wrong and President George W. Bush was right.

But I fear that instead, latter-day students will learn how our 225-year experiment in democracy died that day, self-tempted and self-deceived into a decline and fall far worse than Rome's. I fear despots will cite our unholy new doctrine of preventative war as a precedent for their own despicable actions. I fear they will get away with it because in destroying Iraq, America made collateral damage of the United Nations and international law.