As those risks could so easily have involved the deaths of many more than 3,000 people and the destruction of much more than the buildings of Ground Zero, 3,000 lives was a cheap price to pay for an early warning. America had the shock it needed.This is not a simple task, nor is it possible to guarantee success. There is no easy way to fight asymmetrical warfare, in which opponents with a minute fraction of America’s strength are still able to inflict hideous damage. In the short run, we shall have to see whether we can get through this anniversary week without a major terrorist onslaught (If we do, there are grounds for modest optimism. A successful outcome would suggest that al-Qa’ida’s fangs have been drawn.)The Americans know what they have to do. They can no longer tolerate rogue states which try to acquire weapons of mass destruction while providing terrorists with safe havens. Nor can the US tolerate failed states, which merely become enclaves of anarchy and whose perpetually disaffected populations provide endless foot soldiers for the recruiting sergeants of terrorism.

America is beginning to realise that in order to eliminate the threat to itself, it has to clean up the globe.This is among the best news that the world’s poor have ever had, for in order to make the world safe for Americans it will be necessary to ensure that the wretched of the earth can enjoy some of the benefits which Americans take for granted. Though it would be easy to parody all this as a mission to evangelise on behalf of Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, much more is involved. The US has always believed that societies which enjoy the benefits of democracy, the rule of law and the free market will tend to live at peace with their neighbours, breed relatively contented populations and maintain internal security within their own boundaries.Sometimes this simple faith can lead to naive outcomes, as in Vietnam. In Henry Kissinger’s words: “The United States had entered Indochina for highly moral reasons: the conviction that democratic institutions, being universally applicable, could be transplanted successfully to half of a divided country 8,000 miles away in the midst of a murderous civil war and that the principles that had restored Europe would prove equally applicable to the fledgling politics of South-east Asia.”But occasional excesses do not invalidate either the principle or the generosity which lies behind it. Most Americans believe that over the past two and a half centuries, they have learned to make a human society work almost as well as is possible, within the constraints of original sin. They now feel that it is time for the Third World to profit by their example. That is a daunting exercise; then again, the Americans have never lacked optimism.This is a week to mourn last year’s victims, but the Bush administration knows that mourning is not enough.

It is determined to take the necessary steps to ensure that there will be no second 11 September. If this proves successful, those who are still grieving will have one consolation Last year’s victims will not have died in vain
More from Bruce Anderson. More and more, it seems, we are thinking and talking and writing about fame – talent (or lack of it) and fame, suffering and fame, deserved or undeserved fame. Celebrity – now only second to “I” as the word most frequently deployed by columnists – is the biggest, hottest game in town. But it can also be quite diverting to watch and provides a good living for iffy soap stars, ex-politicians, mouthy pundits and other harmless, marginal figures of our culture.However, the fame game makes its own rules, the most significant of which is that those who play it have no choice as to when they drop out. Once you have stepped into the magic circle, however innocently and diffidently, you surrender a part of yourself. If you happen, say, to be a young, attractive and female novelist, it turns out that the parodic, imitation version of you that will be presented to the world presents sharp and particular problems.The babe novelist is something of a contemporary phenomenon.