2001 is over, let it go

WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- It was certainly not the best of years. It was a very bad year. But the most frightening thing about it was that it was not the worst of years. It prepared the way for others that could prove to be a lot worse than it was.

It was a year of shocking surprises and dashed expectations, big and small. It was a year that for 270 million Americans and countless others around the globe was distilled into a single terrible experience. That was the hypnotic, horrified, fascination experience of watching live on television between 3,000 to 4,000 human beings incinerated, crushed or vaporized after two hijacked airliners crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11. At that moment, nearly two centuries of American invulnerability to foreign invasion and terror ended and a whole new world began.

For Americans, three national leaders emerged with sudden and decisive luster in the backlash and shock waves from those terrible hours.

Mayor Rudi Giuliani of New York City bestrode the crisis like a colossus and proved a shining beacon of comfort and inspiration and strength.

President George W. Bush proved to be a determined and decisive leader who rallied the stunned nation and then steadily, successfully, and relentlessly gathered American military power to smash the headquarters of the al Qaida terrorist organization that plotted the attack. He also made suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, who appeared smug and chuckling in video tapes made early in the campaign, into a hunted, wan fugitive, all too aware that the dogs of vengeance he had believed himself immune to were implacably hunting him down to pay for the innocent blood he had shed.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, widely derided as an inept has-been in the months before Sept. 11, showed himself cool and heroic under fire as he supervised and aided rescue efforts at the stricken Pentagon that Sept. 11. Then he planned and directed for Bush the successful projection of U.S. military power half way around the world into Afghanistan, smashing al Qaida, its protective Taliban allies and bin Laden's personal sense of omnipotent invulnerability at negligible cost in U.S. casualties.

The Sept. 11 attacks and the radically changed world that emerged from them dominated American consciousness. But there were other looming storm clouds and dashed hopes in 2001, this first year -- strictly speaking -- of the 21st century, according to the Christian faith.

It was the year that two of the most populous and important nations in Asia, Japan and Indonesia, with immense senses of relief bid farewell to two tired and bankrupt leaders, Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori and President Abdurrahman Wahid. Mori had ruled Japan for only a year, Wahid had ruled Indonesia for only a year and half. But it seemed to the peoples of both great nations that they had been there far, far longer.

Their successors Junichiro Koizumi in Tokyo and Megawati Sukarnoputri in Jakarta were immensely popular choices, not much younger, but far more original and energetic than their burned-out, discredited predecessors. But in both cases by years' end, they had failed to make any significant inroads to reverse the dire slides toward fiscal and general economic catastrophe in their nations. Japan and Indonesia finished the year in far worse shape than they started it.

The same was even truer of India and Pakistan. There too, bright hopes briefly flickered, only to be snuffed out by the remorseless march of events and replaced on the horizon by terrifying storm clouds.

In mid-July, the leaders of both nations, now armed with nuclear weapons, met at the Indian city of Agra to try and ease the differences between them. But the summit between Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India and President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan fell flat. At the end of the day, their staffs could not even agree on the wording of a joint communiqué to describe how they still differed.

In the following months, the pace of terrorism from Pakistani-backed terror groups against India mounted, culminating in a foiled but potentially devastating attempt to slaughter many of the vast nation's political leaders in the New Delhi parliament itself. As a result, at year's end, two of the most populous nations on Earth appeared trembling on the brink of a war that could go nuclear on both sides all too easily.

It was a year of bad news for the world economy too. Argentina totally melted down -- again at the end of the year. And it yet remains unclear whether the shock waves of that crisis will have devastating repercussions across the other industrially advanced nations of Latin America as well.

Even before Sept. 11, the U.S. economy was sliding inexorably into recession. Over the entire year, more than 1 million jobs were lost. There appeared to be some signs of a potential recovery at the end of the year, but the odds against it still appeared formidably high.

Europe was in the doldrums, too. The German economy remained becalmed. And while Britain and France appeared robust for most of the year, their combined clout could not offset Germany's continued woes or the far more troubling problems in the great global economic locomotives of the United States and Japan.

In the Middle East, things went, once again, from bad to worse. The second Palestinian rising continued. And repeated assurances of a crackdown on terror by Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat or of a revived peace process from Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres were revealed as at best delusional wishful thinking on both sides.

There were islands of improvement and hope, though even they were highly qualified. China did not topple into critical fiscal crisis, as many had feared would happen. Instead, the Chinese people rejoiced in winning the hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the first time in history the world's most populous and arguably most ancient nation had ever won the right to do so.

Russia also continued to post impressive macro-economic growth figures, building on its long, slow recovery from the total implosion that had followed the collapse of communism. But even there birth rates remained catastrophically low and death rates abnormally high. And so far the government of President Vladimir Putin, for all its efforts, has not been able to make any significant inroads into those worrying trends.

"That was the year that was," as the old British satirical song from the 1960s put it. "It's over. Let it go."

Gladly.