Vile as the atrocities on 9/11 were, one can easily imagine worse. Suppose that al-Qaeda had been supported by an awesome superpower intent on overthrowing the government of the United States. Suppose that the attack had succeeded: al-Qaeda had bombed the White House, killed the president, and installed a vicious military dictatorship, which killed some fifty thousand to one hundred thousand people, brutally tortured seven hundred thousand, set up a major center of terror and subversion that carried out assassinations throughout the world, and helped establish neo-Nazi “National Security States” elsewhere that tortured and murdered with abandon. Suppose further that the dictatorship brought in economic advisers—call them “the Kandahar boys”—who within a few years drove the economy to one of its worst disasters in U.S. history while their proud mentors collected Nobel Prizes and received other accolades. That would have been vastly more horrendous than 9/11.
And as everyone in Chile knows, it is not necessary to imagine, because it in fact did happen, right here: on “the first 9/11,” September 11, 1973. The only change above is to per capita equivalents, an appropriate measure. But the first 9/11 did not change history, for good reasons: the events were too normal.