On Wednesday morning, you could still visit a website that combined three of the wonders of Western technology: the Internet, digital cameras and the World Trade Centre. The site allowed people all over the world to do what millions of tourists have done since Minoru Yamasaki's architectural masterpiece was completed in 1973: take in the breath-taking 45-mile view from the top of one of the fabulous towers of meshed steel that punctured the sky like a giant finger pointing to America's unstoppable ascent.
The caption on the site still said "Real-time Hudson River view from World Trade Center". Above it, in the square where a wondrous prospect was meant to unfold, was a deep black nothingness.
Into that horrible vacuum rushed previously unimaginable images: civil jetliners distorted into deadly missiles, a miracle of structural engineering transformed into a nightmarish cascade of melting steel and shattered concrete, a great centre of commerce turned into a chamber of horrors. And into it now, as dazed numbness gives way to grief and rage, will pour an immense desire for the retribution that will bring order back to this utterly disordered world.
By Thursday, the new world order was taking shape. To make sense of the terrifying chaos, there would be a return to simplicities. On the one side, there will be civilisation; on the other, terrorism.
Along, hard conflict is to be fought on many fronts, with America leading the world to ultimate victory. The first war of the 21st century, as George Bush called it, will be a straightforward battle between good and evil. Most of the world made haste to position itself on the right side of that awesome divide. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation evoked, for the first time in its history, the mutual defence clause of its founding charter.
The United Nations Security Council unanimously passed a strong resolution supporting the American position. Russia and China expressed their abhorrence of terrorism. Pakistan, which occupies a key position between the West and fundamentalist Islam, declared its support.
By the end of the week it seemed that revulsion and anger had created the most impressive international alliance in world history. That alliance, moreover, has a clear objective: the defeat of terrorism. And as the identities of those who perpetrated the atrocity began to emerge, that objective ceased to be a faceless abstraction.
The object of this great global alliance will be to destroy the Saudi mass murderer, Osama bin Laden, his followers and those states who have given them aid and comfort.
Behind this apparent simplicity, however, there are, as always, complexities and contradictions. The apparently solid unity of the global community is in fact an unstable combination of two very different elements.
One is sympathy with an America whose citizens have been outrageously attacked and whose national integrity has been scandalously violated. The other is fear of an America that has been wounded and enraged, of a great power preparing to lash out at its enemies. Some of those who have signed up for the war on terrorism (Pakistan, for example) believe that they might otherwise become the objects of that war.
Others (the EU states, for example) hope that by standing with the US they may be able to nudge it away from blind revenge.
There is also, in some cases, a large element of opportunism. A war on terrorism has the huge advantage of making state violence seem less important.
China cannot be unhappy that Western criticism of its human rights record will be muted in the interests of keeping a key member of the Security Council on side.
Russia will be delighted at the opportunity to put its sordid war in Chechnya, which it has always defined as an assault on terrorism, on to the moral high ground.
The enemy against whom this alliance is being assembled is not simple either. The rhetorical tendency to characterise the perpetrators of Tuesday's massacres as mere barbaric Goths at the gates of the Western empire misses the point of what they have done.
They are not ignorant savages who can be bombed back into the Stone Age from which they came. In fact, they too are 21st century warriors. What is truly frightening about them is that they are at the cutting edge of the dizzying, post-modern, media-saturated, globalised civilisation we inhabit. Their language, dress and religious ideology may come from the early Middle Ages. But there is nothing unusual in that. Political ground-breakers often cloak the novelty of what they are doing in the borrowed garb of the distant past.
The French revolutionaries of the 1780s thought of themselves as inheritors of the ancient Roman republic.
The Irish revolutionaries of the early 20th century adopted the Iron Age heroism of Cuchulain.
The medieval mindset of Osama bin Laden and his allies has nothing to do with the Middle Ages and everything to do with the recent history of the Arab world.
That history is one in which local Arab despots, many of them the creation of the West during the Cold War, sought to impose industrial modernity through fear and brutality.
The great Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski, summed up this process in his reflection on the Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah of Iran: "A nation trampled by despotism, degraded, forced into the role of an object, seeks shelter. But a whole nation cannot emigrate, so it undertakes a migration in time rather than in space. In the face of circling afflictions and of reality, it goes back to a past that seems a lost paradise. The old acquires a new sense, a new and provocative meaning."
Because their devotion to what they take for Islamic tradition is a response to life at the sharp edge of globalisation, the terrorists who imagined and executed Tuesday's assaults have an extraordinarily sophisticated understanding of Western technology and culture.
If we are, as American officials repeatedly said this week, about to fight a new kind of war, it is one which the terrorists understand intimately because they have invented it.
They know three things about the 21st century world that the rest of us are only beginning to grasp. They know that the old order of nation states is being replaced by fluid global networks. ] That technology is a double-edged sword that can be turned against its inventors. And that war and violence now occupy the space that used to beheld by artists and writers - the space inside people's heads. To fight them effectively, the West must first acquire this knowledge.
The ability to operate in a borderless world, through a fluid set of affiliations, is what makes Islamic fundamentalist terrorism so powerful. In his jihad against the United States, bin Laden has constructed a network (Al Qaeda or The Base) that one analyst has characterised as "bigger than a guerrilla group and more complex than a multinational corporation. Call it a 'virtual country' -- the Republic of Jihadistan".
Richard Rosecrance, an expert on terrorism at the University of California at Berkeley, describes this virtual country as having "state-like aspects, but without state borders".
The dark brilliance of this network is its ability to turn Western technology back on the West. Long before this week, the director of the US National Security Agency publicly complained that Al Qaeda's sophisticated use of the Internet and encryption techniques have defied Western eavesdropping attempts.
Beyond that mastery of cyberspace, however, is the outsider's capacity to see clearly what the insider takes for granted. The orchestrators of Tuesday's nightmare could see the cracks in the facade of Western technological might. They could reimagine a plane as a guided missile, a 1 10-storey tower as a gigantic vertical trap.
No medieval barbarian could do this. Osama bin Laden understands the strengths and weaknesses of modern technology because his family literally built the structures of Western modernity in the deserts of Arabia. He is a man who grew up with the mysteries of structural engineering, steel and concrete. His father owned and ran a huge construction company. As bin Laden remarked in an interview with an Arabic newspaper: "It is not a secret that he was one of the founders of the infrastructure of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia." Osama himself "worked at an early age on roads in my father's company, may God have mercy on his soul". The fortune he now uses to fuel his jihad is part of the immense wealth that the West has paid over in return for the oil that fuels its cars and planes. Alongside this intimate grasp of Western technology is a deep sense of how our media-saturated culture works. In his 1991 novel Mao II, the American writer Don DeLillo reflected on the way terrorists have replaced artists as the people who get inside our heads and change the way we think and feel. One character, a Middle Eastern conspirator, remarks that terrorists impose their imaginations on reality in the way that writers used to do: "A person sits in a room and thinks a thought and it bleeds out into the world." Another, an American novelist, agrees: "Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the. new tragic narrative."
The people who brought the tragic narrative of midair explosions and crumbled buildings to new heights of demonic artistry on Tuesday and made their sick thoughts bleed out into the world understood Western culture far better than it understands them. To be able to conceive of the horrible spectacle they inserted forever into our imaginations, they must have watched a lot of Hollywood disaster movies. Martin Price, an Irishman who was working on the 40th floor of the first tower when it was hit, wrote in The Irish Times on Thursday: "I felt a little detached from the scenes I was watching.
Like many others interviewed later, I felt as if I was involved in a life-like disaster movie."
The people who scripted and directed it grasped the sickening, disorienting effect of turning far-fetched fiction into reality.
They exploited with unerring control the strange sense of distance that most of us feel in a world where electronic imagery has colonised the inside of our heads.
What all of this suggests is that, if this is a new kind of war, grasping the newness is just as important as fighting the war. One of the ways in which Tuesday changed the world is that the old institutions of political power-- the US, NATO, the EU, the UN -- suddenly seem very old-fashioned compared to the cutting-edge virtual country of the Islamic militants.
The temptation for the old institutions is to fall back on what they know, a 20th century war of carpet bombing and Cruise missiles, the bludgeon of brute force in which the collateral damage to innocent civilians is a minor detail. Osama bin Laden would enjoy that. He has already withstood intensive conventional attacks by the old Soviet Union during the Afghan war and by the United States in the aftermath of his attacks on its embassies in Africa. He would relish the chaos and outrage on which his jihad thrives He would enjoy the irony of seeing the West attack those states it deems to be his hosts while all the time his network remains safely lodged in dozens of countries, among them the bastions of the West itself.
He will know that in order to fight him, the West must first match his sophistication. Can it understand Islam as well as he understands the West? Can it get into the heads of Muslims as effectively as he has lodged himself in ours?
Can it find a way of putting order on the strange world that globalisation has wrought and that he has grasped so clearly? He will hope and trust that the urgent nee4 for vengeance will leave no time for the long, hard process of thought that is necessary to answer those questions. I