9/11 remembered

September 10, 2001, is a date belonging to a different era to the one we now find ourselves in – the final moments of a now-distant age before global terror, before daily fears about security and before seemingly endless wars in far-off lands.

The next day, the world would change forever. And conversely, as those grimly iconic images are replayed around the world this weekend, all the shock and the horror of those fateful hours will come flooding back as if it were yesterday.

Ten years on, amid the mourning and the solemn remembrance, we can survey the tumultuous decade which followed with some sense of perspective.

There have been vital successes. Bin Laden is gone, his terror network now seemingly on the wane. The Taliban have been overthrown, the havens and training camps of Afghanistan eradicated. Saddam Hussain is no more, unable to threaten the region or the wider world.

But there have been dreadful failures, too. The ongoing nightmare of Afghanistan. The utter chaos of post-war Iraq. The ill-judged rhetoric of a “war on terror”. Unforgivably, the Israeli-Palestine conflict – the Arab world’s primary grievance – remains no closer to solution.

And yet, reasons for cautious optimism exist.

David Miliband, the former Foreign Secretary, this week felt able to call 9/11 “the high point” in al-Qaida’s murderous campaign. While yesterday’s fresh terror alerts remind us to be wary of assumptions, it can at least now be hoped that that darkest of days was a one-off in the sheer scale of what took place.

And at a global level, the upsurge of democracy that has spread across the Middle East like wildfire this year offers real hope of a new dawn for the Arab world, and consequently its relations with the West.

Tomorrow, as the world stops to remember 9/11, it is within those flames of freedom that we must find our solace.