This is two months old, but a series of articles in the New York Metro published articles by twenty authors on the topic of what if 9/11 never happened. Here are a few highlights worth bringing to your attention.

Andrew Sullivan on President Al Gore leading an attack on Afghanistan in 2006 and the rapid response by a highly organized assymetric Al Qaeda.

Thomas Friedman says we’d be in a tense standoff with China.

The 9/11 attacks put America and China on the same side of a new divide between the world of order and the world of disorder. Since the U.S. and China have the biggest and most important relationship in the world, the fact that tensions didn’t increase was a big geopolitical dog that didn’t bark. All of the oil price trends would have existed””?and existed more, because if 9/11 didn’t happen, there would have been more globalization, more global commerce. China and India would have risen as fast, if not faster. September 11 didn’t stop globalization, obviously, but it slowed the process down. And North Korea would have been as far, if not farther along, in its ambitions, because China, given a more hostile relationship with the U.S., would have been less cooperative in dealing with Kim Jong Il.

Leon Wieseltier says it best—it was just a matter of time.

Because if 9/11 had not happened, then 9/12 would have happened, or 9/13 or 9/14. The turbulence in the Islamic world; the fear of modernity and its great representative, the United States; the hatred of Israel””?these were all waiting to explode. (So was the North Korean nuclear gambit and the Iranian nuclear gambit: The world was, even then, a much more perilous place than many Americans, and many American policymakers, had wanted to know.)

Ron Suskind follows up with that with more detail, stating that the “Shoe Bomber” would have been successful.

Would we be as vigilant if there hadn’t been a 9/11, vigilant enough to have found and foiled the London plot? Probably not. There’s a fair to good chance that there would be ten planes blowing up over the continental U.S. As for Iraq, the Bush administration’s intention from the very start was not whether to overthrow Saddam, but how. Certainly the administration was focused on setting new rules of the geopolitical game as the world’s sole superpower. The view was that Saddam Hussein could be made an example of, that he was an easy mark, and that that would shape global behavior and send a signal to anyone with the temerity to challenge us. We might be in Iraq even without 9/11.

NYU Professor Dalton Conley says that New York was perhaps the least affected area.

Places like Scranton, Pennsylvania, or Mobile, Alabama, have had their daily rhythms and lives continuously uprooted, and New York, and Manhattan in particular, with perhaps the lowest percentage of reservists of any area in the country, has not really felt the impact of Afghanistan and Iraq as much as Peoria, Illinois. The forces that have made New York what they are today””?the drop in crime, the rising income inequality, the continual changeover from a city of renters to a city of co-op owners””?these have little to do with 9/11.

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