Planes crashing into skyscrapers; huge exploding fireballs; towering buildings collapsing; billowing clouds of black smoke; crowds running in panic down the streets – surely we had seen this all before in countless disaster films.

And frankly the events unfolding before our eyes seemed too incredible to be anything but some unbelievable movie plot. Terrorists flying planes full of people into the New York World Trade Centre? The Pentagon attacked and hundreds killed? Come on! These kinds of things don’t happen in real life! But on the morning of September 11, 2001 they did.

The rational part of my brain was aghast at this terrible tragedy. But an instinctual childish portion was exclaiming “Wow, this is exciting! What’s going to happen next?” and kept half waiting for the wise cracking tough guy hero to come along and save the day before a real disaster happened. But he never came. And an unimaginable catastrophe really had taken place. The financial heart of the world’s richest city had been reduced to a pile of rubble and thousands of innocent people had been killed. There was grim reality, not a Hollywood fantasy and there was going to be no inevitable happy ending today.

And maybe in America there never will be again. For America’s image of itself as invincible and impregnable is perhaps gone forever. The most powerful country in history now knows itself to be just as vulnerable as any other. And sadly, while most of the world was truly shocked with grief, many people were partly happy at this, even some of us Jamaicans who rely so heavily on America economically and have so many relatives over there. But then no other country arouses such contradictory feelings as the US.

Now though it has at times fallen short of the democratic ideals it so loves to preach when seeking its own self-interest, the US has done more than anyone else – except probably Great Britain – to promote the cause of freedom. Would those kneejerk anti-Americans who harp on the negative aspects of the US have preferred to live under Nazi Germany’s or Soviet Russia’s or even communist China’s hegemony? Life is often a choice not between good and bad but between bad and worse. And America may be the least bad dominant power the world has ever seen. Whatever sins it has committed, nearly everyone else has committed more.

Yet in truth the US is more admired and feared than liked. The problem is that it’s not enough for America to be the best, it has to keep proclaiming this superiority at the top of its voice. It’s not enough for it to win nearly every gold medal at the Olympics, it has to complain about the ones it doesn’t. Much anti-American sentiment is based on envy, for a lot of people would like to have been born in world’s number one country. But the USA’s irritating habit of not only being number one but constantly boasting about it is has made many who should be grateful to the US resent it. And if it didn’t keep shouting continually that it is the great defender of democracy, the occasions when it supports dictators and engineers coups to protect its economic interests would not seem so glaringly hypocritical.

Even worse, America’s lack of humility and arrogance often hardens into indifference to other’s feelings. We are so great, it sometimes seems to say, that we don’t care what other people think or if we offend their sensibilities because we don’t need anybody else. Look at President George W. Bush’s rejection of almost every international treaty presented to him. The implicit message is obvious - we are the biggest and the baddest and can do anything we want to and whoever doesn’t like it can go to hell. What can they do about it anyway?

Well last Tuesday it found out. “How could anyone do something like this?” the commentators kept asking. How could anyone so brazenly penetrate the military heart of the most powerful country on earth? And how could anyone deliberately kill not only themselves but thousands of innocent people?

The answer to both questions was one word - hate. Make a man hate you enough and even his own life becomes meaningless in his quest for revenge. Make his life miserable enough and he will go to any lengths to make yours miserable too. America learned last Tuesday that not even the most technologically advanced defenses in the world can protect you from people who place no value on their own lives. There has never been and never will be a weapon so powerful as men who are willing to die for a cause. Commentators kept calling the hijackers cowards. But evil and despicable though they were, no one can rationally say that men willing to sacrifice themselves - for however horrible a reason – lack courage.

The grim fact is that those who caused the worst loss of life on American soil since the Civil War were armed with nothing more than plastic knives and a willingness to die. Such people cannot be defeated by sheer force. Any plane can be hijacked. Any building is vulnerable. And it might be worse next time, for communities can be gassed or their water poisoned. America will tighten its defenses. But it can never be truly safe while the bitter anger that motivated these men continues to fester in others.

This is not to say the US should proclaim itself friends with all and unilaterally disarm. But it certainly should ask itself why a country which claims to do only good and support only righteous causes is so passionately hated by so many. One of the most telling images on television last Tuesday was Palestinian children rejoicing spontaneously at the news of the plane crashes. Even if Osama Bin Laden’s entire network were eliminated, here clearly were thousands of future replacements. The problems of the Middle East may be well nigh insoluble, but something must be wrong with policies that are making so many people in a region willing to sacrifice themselves to destroy others.

America is perhaps greatest force for good this world has ever seen, and there are a thousand ways in which we all have to be grateful to it. Which is why most of the planet shared its grief on September 11. This was not merely an American disaster, for citizens from at least 12 countries were killed and it could easily have happened anywhere. We all hope nothing like this attack on democracy and civilization ever happens again. The perpetrators of this horrible act must be sought and destroyed.

But unless the US changes the way it deals with the rest of the world and tries to lessen the hatred that bred such men, it will only breed more. “No man is an island, entire of itself” John Donne once wrote. And, as America now knows, no country is a world. changkob@hotmail.com