Soon after 9am on September 11, 2001, I landed, on board a United Airlines flight from Hong Kong, at Chicago's O'Hare airport, intending to transfer to a flight to Washington. I never made it. Instead, I spent four days around O'Hare, before finding a train to New York and the smell of the downtown devastation. That provided a vantage point for observing the public's generally sober and unhysterical initial response to the shock.
Five years on, and the shock is of a different kind. As I write, the headline in today's International Herald Tribune reads: 'Bush plays terror card in looking to elections.' The cynicism of this underachiever, thrust into prominence by a political machine capitalising on the Bush name, is a reminder that he is probably still in office only because of repeated playing of the 'terror card'.
Even back then, one was aware of the danger of 9/11 being abused for political purposes. I wrote in the South China Morning Post at the time: 'The more we overreact, the more likely that the terrorists will achieve their ends ... it will set off a chain of further reactions that will have negative effects, particularly for America and all that is best about it. What better way to undermine the US than to incite it to the point where the US sets itself against its own principles?'
In short, the success of Osama bin Laden would be determined not by his actions, but by our reactions.
I would like to think that was merely stating the obvious. But, looking back, one can see how susceptible all societies are to fear or, more specifically, to the use of real or imagined threats for ends other than safety. It was Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels who noted how readily people would surrender their liberties if persuaded that their security was at risk.
So what is the balance sheet now, of the reactions of the United States, and its friends and allies, to 9/11?