Of all the cities that I have seen around the world, to me the most beautiful and the most friendly is New York City. It is, above all other cities, a metropolis of warmth, of great culture, and of vibrant life. Its architecture is remarkable and memorable, and one of the greatest achievements of Manhattan architecture was the now devastated World Trade Center.Its reconstruction is a matter of the highest priority - AFTER the problem of terrorism has been dealt with of course - and money must be no object. It would also be the most fitting memorial possible to those innocents who died so horribly, so tragically, so needlessly, in this savage and insane attack.

I am reproducing an article from a reader, a slightly condensed version of a series which that reader prepared for another site:
Susan MacDonald

The events of last Tuesday, September the 11th, stunned the world.

It is indeed a day that will 'live in infamy', and overshadows in horror and evil anything that happened to the United States in the twentieth century. Pearl Harbour was, after all, a military operation by enemy planes, which was inspired by an earlier British attack on the Italian fleet in harbour by a flight of Fairy Swordfish. It was a surprise attack, but it was something normal and with precedent, and so something that could be assimilated and understood.

This is different. The attacks have a sickeningly bizarre aspect, like some terrible nightmare. Many of the facts are so painful and harrowing that they are beyond words, such as millions of people watching helplessly on live television as the second plane suddenly appeared and flew into the already burning tower, or innocent people trapped on the higher levels forced to jump to their deaths…these thoughts turn one's stomach.

A particularly horrible and disturbing aspect of the attack was that the peaceful and beneficent creations of a great nation - domestic airliners - were seized, and forced, against their will, to smash into the country's military headquarters, and the loveliest and most shining symbol of everything good that the United States has given to the world over the past two centuries - the World Trade Center. Yes, I know that passenger jets don't have a 'will', but I am sure others experienced the same turbulent feelings as I. At least the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbour employed Japanese aircraft, and in that sense had a kind of acceptable normalcy about it. The attacks last Tuesday were like one of those grotesque horror films in which a possessed man is helplessly compelled to strangle or shoot himself.

The collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center was especially terrible. They were exquisite in their lustrous, solid beauty, and I can do no better than quote 'A New York Lyric', by that fine American essayist Patrick Spooner, which was first published two years ago:

'The city has numerous remarkable public buildings, such as the old police headquarters, but its finest buildings were constructed by great private wealth. The Flatiron Building, the Seagram Building, Rockefeller Center, the Woolworth Building, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building; one can walk for miles and miles, and never run out of them...

'And the towers of the World Trade Center? They, I believe, are structures of incredible beauty too...these silvery monoliths shine with an internal fire even on the gloomiest days; to me they look like sophisticated  electronic machine parts, conductors of energy, vastly enlarged'.

Conductors of creative entrepreneureal energy is exactly what they were. More than any other buildings on earth, they symbolised the creative power and freedom of capitalism, the only economic system capable of bringing out the very best in Man, and the only system capable of providing the very standard of living that so many of the well-fed, middle class left in Wetern countries simply take for granted. When I visited New York I discovered the glory of the World Trade Center for myself.

On a frigidly cold November dawn, I took the ferry from its berth on Staten Island over to Manhattan, and, standing completely alone on the outside deck in the clear, sub-zero air, watched the first rays of the morning sunlight touch and gleam upon those magnificent, shining monoliths, that formed a kind of inspired prow to the whole island of Manhattan. It was, for me, one of those uplifting, and very rare, epiphanies that the great heroes experience in the novels of Ayn Rand.

That they are now gone is, as I have written, something that is still impossible to fully absorb. But they can be rebuilt. The wing of the Pentagon will obviously be rebuilt, but some people, even some with good motives, have suggested that the Trade Center site should be turned into a 'memorial park', with a miniature bronze representation of the two towers as its centrepiece.

This idea is terribly, terribly wrong. If the towers are not rebuilt (I would rebuild them exactly as they were), then the lasting effect will be worse than the defeat in Viet Nam, and the terrorists will have won. The World Trade Center symbolised, more than any other building in America, the gifts of economic and political liberty which the United States has given to the world, and for which the left has such a malignant and envious hatred. If America is seen to have lost confidence in capitalism then we are all doomed.

For make no mistake, the left does not hate America for its faults. It hates America for its virtues. It hates America for that very devotion to political and economic liberty which has been responsible for raising living standards, in those countries where that economic and political liberty was permitted to exist, to unprecedented heights.

Tragically for the future of the nation, and the world, I think that the president has already unconsciously revealed that his response will be weak and wobbly. The day of mourning and prayer was a rotten idea, a weak-willed and spiritually crippling idea for the American people who are feeling so sorrowfully furious in the face of this devastating and incomprehensible horror, and who need the president, who is meant to be in part an embodiment of the whole nation, to express for them the passionate rage which they are feeling now. The media images of the president's first response to the tragedy reeked of the Carter administration at its worst, and must have had the terrorists responsible laughing their heads off.

When Pearl Harbour was bombed, there was no day of mourning and prayer. Instead, FDR made one of the most stirring and memorable speeches in American history, a speech which gave assurance to the world that Japan was now to be met with a typhoon of biblical vengeance. And, with Harry Truman's help, that assurance was amply fulfilled.

Many have displayed conspicuous heroism in the face of the disaster, in particular those aid workers who entered the flaming and crippled tower to assist those within, and more than half of whom lost their lives when the tower collapsed. Another group may be the passengers aboard the fourth plane, which crashed in Pennsylvania not far from Camp David. Those assisting in the area are convinced that the passengers aboard somehow caused the plane to crash, and if so America owes them an immeasurable debt of gratitude: it is thought that the fourth plane was targeted at either the White House or the Capitol Building.

As for the precise military response to this sickening and beastly act, I will leave that to others. However, it should be reasonably swift, very strong, and it should be carried out with full moral confidence. It should not be a 'Jimmy Carter job', and it is imperative - absolutely imperative - that George W. Bush take no notice whatsoever of the cowardly moral cretins on the left who predominate in American schools and universities, in the media, and in a great deal of the parliaments of the United States. While mouthing platitudes about how 'tragic' it all is, they will try to use these dreadful and disspiriting attacks to weaken Bush's presidency, to weaken and belittle capitalism and freedom in the United States, and, by nitpicking demands for exacting evidence, will do their utmost to see that those responsible get away scot free. And I am quite sure that the National Security Agency, the CIA, and the FBI have a pretty good idea of who those responsible are.

In my opinion President Bush must sit down and ask himself just one question:

'What would Ronald Reagan, or Harry S. Truman, do, if faced with this heinous attack?'

That will give him the confidence I think he desperately needs, and provide him with the correct response. And there must be no more looking all sorrowful and sensitive, and having days of prayer and remembrance. The country has had one too many of those already.

Now is the time for righteously angry action.

When I saw the dreadful and heart-breaking sight of the World Trade Center tower in flames against the brilliant blue sky, it looked like one of those violent and futuristic  paperback covers, and, for the first time, I really felt as though I were living in the twenty first century.

I had not experienced that before. For a 52 year old person, even the missile crisis, the Beatles, the Viet Nam years, and the hand-wringing idiocy of the Carter administration still seemed close. But no more. As the twin towers collapsed, the comparative innocence of the Cold War suddenly seemed a long, long time ago, ancient history, and I was now confronting the world of the future.

It is not a very optimistic thought to cross one's mind, but the September 11th attacks do not have to be a presage of what is to come. That all depends on the response of the Bush administration: right now, they have decisions to make which may affect the course of the world over the next one hundred years.

As I stated in the first part of this article, I have fearful doubts about George W. Bush's ability to cope with this crisis firmly, decisively, and correctly.  Obviously it is better having him in the White House at this time than Gore, that would be utterly unthinkable, and the Islamic terrorists would have found no more mealy-mouthed and accommodating a friend. But I can't escape the feeling that Mr. Bush is still just the fun-loving Guv'ner of Texas, who has somehow wandered into the wrong office, and now finds himself forced to deal with something far bigger and more monstrous than the Mexican Army, or a whooping war-cry of Apaches.

Let me begin by stating a couple of axiomatic premises:

(1) This famous dictum of Edmund Burke is absolutely true.

Despite people's occasional nostalgic wistfulness about 'times of innocence', there has never been an innocent time in human history. It has always been necessary to confront and fight evil.

What Burke was writing about was, in the twentieth century, exemplified in international affairs by the policy of appeasement: the idea that the only practical way of dealing with evil was to allow it to take everything that it wants, to bow and scrape to it, to apologise to it, and to accommodate its every demand. It was the policy of appeasement that led to Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich, waving a scrap of paper at the airport, and proclaiming 'peace in our time'. When confronted by Islamic terrorists, past American presidents have been champions of appeasement for decades, and now we have finally seen the culmination of all that dithering and uncertainty.

Appeasement does not work, and has never, never, never, never worked. Even the most loathsome apologists of the America-hating left, people like Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, and Peter Singer, know that it does not work, and that it has never worked, and that is precisely why they will champion it, especially in the face of Islamic terrorism.

(2) This is an act of international warfare, not the plotting of a few Arabs in some basement garage.

Professor Leonard Peikoff, in a Melbourne radio interview last week, put this very well. Commenting on the immediate claims by the left and their functionaries that 'we mustn't jump to conclusions', and 'we must have all the evidence', Professor Peikoff stated, 'It's nonsense. All of that is total nonsense. The criminal is totally known, and has been for many decades'. Responding to the all-too-typical, and utterly pathetic and homespun remark of President Bush, that 'We're going to find the folks that did this', Peikoff said, 'We know the "folks" who did this. The "folks" who did this are the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan, as a starter…'

As I write, the Sunday papers are on display in Melbourne's supermarkets, with, emblazoned on the front page, the pictures of two seedy, disreputable men, who look…gee, you can see the people in the tinned fruit aisle looking at each other, and thinking…'Well, they do look very Middle Eastern, don't they?' Of course they look Middle Eastern. They are Middle Eastern. Everybody, absolutely everybody on the face of the earth without exception, knew that they would be Middle Eastern. Who did the public doubters and must-have-forensic-evidence gatherers imagine might be behind this - the Finnish Chamber of Commerce?

As I wrote the day after the attack, the left will make evidentiary demands which are motivated by their desire that the terrorists, and those governments who harboured and supported them, never be punished. The most offensive and psychopathic statement was by Geoffrey Robinson (of 'Hypotheticals'), who said that this was a merely 'criminal' action, and not a war-like action, and that it should be treated as a police matter.

I cannot imagine what kind of surrealist, morally damaged world this palm-wringing, public school puff-adder of the left, with his foppish schoolboy haircut still on display well into middle age, inhabits. One has an image of Superintendent Barlow of Scotland Yard, hands thrust deep into overcoat pockets, and accompanied by a pretty but sensible young policewoman, walking into an Afghan terrorist training camp, bristling with flight simulators, bomb factories, and Stinger missiles, and announcing, ''Ello, 'ello, 'ello! What's all this then? Sergeant, place these men under close arrest, and escort them into the back of a police van. And see that you give the place a good dusting for fingerprints'.

Incidentally, there is a very telling hypocrisy at work here, which reveals that the left are fundamentally on the side of the terrorists. In the 1950s J. Edgar Hoover, head of the F.B.I., continued to maintain that there was no such thing as organised crime in the United States, and that any case that was obviously a mob killing had to be treated as just a case of individual murder, with the police looking for evidence for the person responsible, without paying any attention to the ultimately guilty organisation behind the killer, who was, in fact, nothing more than an instrument of the Mafia.

Hoover was quite wrong of course, and even he must have known that. It is probable that he didn't want his precious agents to be corrupted by bribery. But the left were certainly amongst those who pointed out that organised crime did exist, and that steps had to be taken to eradicate it, rather than treating every mob killing as an unconnected crime. And yet they will work tirelessly to protect the Islamic terrorist organisations, and governments, who stand behind the individuals who committed these atrocities.

This sick-making horror was an attack on America's morale. The act of terrorism is specifically the act of killing, without warning, innocent people, often in their hundreds or thousands, and, for every one killed, a hundred more will be frightened and broken. America is a resilient and heroic country, but there has been damage, and it needs to be repaired. America has the means, the whole world knows that. But it must demonstrate that it has the resolve. The man who is meant to lead the way here is the president. I will now outline what I think he must do.

I hope that the reader will not find the first suggestion 'extremist', or, even worse, 'impractical'. I am not a paintball-playing, ersatz Rambo, thumbing through grubby copies of 'Soldier of Fortune' with thick fingers. In fact I loathe people of that ilk.

The suggestion I am about to make is anything but 'impractical': that word - like 'simplistic' - is merely a code word used by the left which means that they do not want you to do something which they privately know is the correct thing to do. It is, if America cares for its national pride and its economic future, the most practical of actions, and can be accomplished quickly, and with no bloodshed. That suggestion is:
 
First, the United States must sever all connection with the United Nations.

This should be absolutely not open to discussion. For decades the U.N. has been a body which was wasted trillions of dollars of the world's resources to absolutely no good effect at all. Its only apparent functions are to grant legitimacy, and membership in the human race, to totalitarian dictatorships which have enslaved and murdered their own people, (usually while complaining about human rights issues in free Western cultures), and have signed documents defining 'rights', which the countries that do respect individual rights are expected to follow, while the countries that have no rights at all, but are the main signatories of these charters, can completely ignore.

Since the Second World War, the United Nations has been the major means of attacking and hobbling the United States, and preventing it from defending its own interests, and bears a heavy responsibility for the appeasement policies which American presidents have been following for half a century. And - even worse - which country provides most of the capital needed to keep this contemptuous organisation going, and whose capital permits its Third World representatives to live lives of comfortable opulence, while their people are starving? The United States, that's who. I recall a cartoon in a mainstream American magazine ('The New Yorker', I think) which portrayed two African or Middle Eastern representatives at their General Assembly desks, both smiling, and one saying to the other, 'It's a great system. They pay us so we can kick sand in their faces'.

No more. It has been pointed out that even if America said that it was going to make those behind the terrorists pay a terrible price, nobody would believe them, not after fifty years of vaccilating appeasement. Very true, but if the president were to withdraw the country from any further connection with the U.N., and withdraw forever all future funding of that body, and appear on television outlining the reasons for that decision, AND give a sombre warning that the United States would now be defending its own interests without reference to any highly paid collection of totalitarian thugs, then the gleeful dancing in the streets of terrorist countries would stop in ten seconds flat. The governments of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and others would then know that their time had come.

Second, the United States must launch a strong and effective military action against terrorist enclaves and governments.

Any idea of a joint U.N. response (!), with a terrorist state being issued with the demand that some particular terrorist be handed over for trial, would be quite useless. It would be like insisting that the vast organisation of the Mafia hand over one token killer, and then be allowed to go on operating as before.

The first terrorists were the nineteenth century anarchists, and one who was arrested and charged with the wilful murder of innocent people by bombing, replied, 'There are no innocent borgeoise'.

This is the insane and collectivist thinking of the terrorist fanatic. However, the United States must not lower itself to the level of fanaticism of its enemies. There are innocent Muslims; and the cities of terrorist states are full of them.

A demand must be made to the governments of the rogue states that those governments stand down at once, and be replaced by an American administrator, disarm their weapons, and destroy all their terrorist training camps and enclaves (they know where they are), and confine all the terrorists. It needs to be made clear that any other states giving protection and asylum to the governments involved will be treated as equally culpable (but there won't be any).

If the governments involved do not submit, there needs to be a massive conventional strike, focused as accurately as possible to avoid innocent deaths in the terrorist countries. (Innocent people will die, and in that case the United States should at least avoid the repugnant euphemism 'collateral damage', which the left correctly found so offensive at the time of the Gulf War in 1991).

There has been talk (on both sides) of bombing these countries 'back to the Stone Age', demonstrating that General Curtis Le May's memorable remark at the time of the Viet Nam War has not lost its pungent force. In fact these Islamic fanatics are living in a dark, subterranean world of medieval insanity, in which life has no meaning, the murder of non-Muslims is seen as a moral responsibility, and violent self-annhiliation is seen as the ultimate human achievement. They are a long way behind the Stone Age, which was simply the earliest age of Man's invention and progress towards civilisation. To send them back to the Stone Age would be in reality a massive step forward for them, but I suppose it is only a commonplace figure of speech.

If there are terrorist camps and enclaves in these countries which are in remote areas, away from innocent members of the population, then they should be destroyed with the greatest possible prejudice. The thousands of dead who suffered so horribly in America demands no less. Nobody will respond. As we found out after the Cold War ended, not even the Soviet Union could have seriously challenged America's military might.

Third, the World Trade Center must be rebuilt.

I have not been able to bring myself to view the footage of the destruction of this building, which was a special favourite of mine, and I do not think I will, at least not for many, many years.

To rebuild it would be an act of great healing, and vital for the restoration of morale, especially in America's greatest and loveliest city. Those majestic, resplendent ingots of filigreed gold must not be permitted to vanish for ever; that would give the terrorists a victory which they must not have.

Negative voices are already being raised that it could not be done because of new building restrictions, that it would be too expensive, that nobody would want to rent space in it, and so on. The expense argument can be ignored totally, that is merely the left hypocritically employing an 'economic rationalist' argument to stop the reconstruction of this symbol of American greatness. If there are prohibitive building restrictions, then they must be put aside: surely the nation is worth that. And if nobody wanted to rent space in it (which is absolute rubbish - it would be considered an act of patriotism) then so be it. But once the threat of international terrorism was removed, tenants would be queuing up to move in.

Only the precise restoration (as far as possible) of a great building destroyed by enemy action can be fully satisfying. When Coventry Cathedral in England was destroyed by Nazi bombing, a new cathedral in the delinquent modern style of church architecture was built, which completely lacks any sense of the sacred, and which nobody likes very much. Looking at photographs of the gothic glory of the old cathedral, one cannot help but be overcome by a wave of sadness, and of tragic loss.

No sense of sadness and loss is felt by the visitor to the British Houses of Parliament in Westminster, and yet these too had to be rebuilt after the Blitz. The usual crowd of architectural vandals wanted to tear down what remained, and build a new, and 'better' parliament, in plain and unsatisfying twentieth century style (which would have been quite wrong for the British Parliament), with more seats for the increased numbers of members, as well as larger offices and facilities and so on.

Winston Churchill was absolutely firm: the parliament would be rebuilt exactly as it had been. He was challenged with the usual clamour of objections, but dismissed them all. When someone pointed out that the old chamber had been too small to accommodate seats for the full membership of the present House of Commons, Churchill did not even blink. 'Then let them stand', he replied. And today, when you enter that wonderful building, the fact that it is mainly of post war construction does not even cross your mind.

At least on this issue, George W. Bush has a chance to show himself to be a Churchillian leader. At the very, very least, if he lacks the strength and leadership to rebuild the whole complex, he must at least rebuild the exterior of the towers. It is, after all, their symbolic value as a new Statue of Liberty towering over Lower Manhattan which is most important. The structures could contain lift wells so that visitors could still get those unmatched views of the harbour, and the whole length of Manhattan Island.

And once the external structure is there, and made as strong as possible, would it be possible to gradually add floors and offices within, from the bottom up? Possibly not. In any case, at the foot of the towers, there should be a memorial to the victims who so tragically and needlessly died in this  obscene attack (yes, memorials, and days of prayer and remembrance, and three minute silences, do have their place - AFTER the war is won), which could consist of a polished wall inscribed with the names, and nationalities, of all those innocents who lost their lives, not just those in New York, but those who died in the Pentagon, and the passengers on the doomed planes, whose experience must have been especially traumatic. But the greatest and finest memorial of all to the dead would be the rebuilding of the towers themselves.

Once these three steps have been taken, the United States can again be a proud, confident, and independent nation, as it was a century ago. The American people are ready. Their spirit has never been broken, and it never will be. Now it is up to Mr. Bush and his administration.