Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy was in her house in northern Viriginia watching the television when she heard about the first attack on the World Trade Center.
“So of course I went right in and stood there at the television and saw live the second tower attack,” said the U.S. Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence. But while she was sitting in her chair watching the attacks, she heard a muffled explosion.
“I felt my chair move just enough,” she said. “I didn’t make the connection until a couple of minutes later I saw the Pentagon had been attacked by a third airplane.”
Kennedy lives about a dozen miles south of the Pentagon near the Potomac River.
“It was a very hard thing, not only for me, but for you,” she said. “This is so very, very personal. This is something that everyone is feeling together and we are not alone.”
According to Kennedy, the only way for evil to flourish is for “good people to do nothing.” She said Americans need to understand the context of the attacks as well as think about the country’s response.
“I think in terms of our response there is a short-, a mid- and a long-term response,” she said. “I think we need to be doing all three levels of response now. The first one is the only one we’re doing.”
Kennedy said Americans will defeat terrorism.
“That will happen, you can rest assured this will happen,” she said. “We will be over it economically, politically and militarily.”
She said that the United States needs an international protocol to figure out its true enemies.
“It’s going to be a much more nuanced international security scene,” she said.
Long-term plans involves dealing with “root causes,” she said to find out why terrorism occurs.
“We don’t need to wait until the future hits us in the face,” she said. “We need to go out there and shape the future we want to have.”
As the Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, Kennedy had to be ready for the future as well as have a response.
“We didn’t try to predict (the future), we were looking at trends,” she said. “We looked at three major areas: demographics, economics and information.”
She said that by the year 2020 the world will be divided into three major groups. She said that 1.5 billion people will be in advanced countries, 5 billion in the survival level and the last 2 billion will be the low survival level.
“Their lives will be short, broodish and terrible,” she said. She said that the world will be more urbanized and the differences in age groups will be enormous.
Economically, “our country will continue to flourish,” she said. “We worry about recession, but we’re fine.”
Kennedy stressed that Americans need to use information to help others.
“We continue to see the misery of these other countries,” she said. “I think much of the outreach from other counties to us is partly because they understand that they are as threatened by these terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 as we are. They see the connection.”
She said that Americans will see the importance of treaties with other countries. She said we need to with with other nations to defeat terrorism.
“We need to know that we are not in it by ourselves,” Kennedy said. “We’re in a time of real cultural divide – we have the Islamic east versus the western Judeo-Christian culture. You have people who don’t want change in society and those who do. You have people who believe power is scarce and you have people who believe power is abundant.”
She said she doesn’t “feel great mercy” for those who are behind the events of Sept. 11. She is looking for order and a “good set of protocols.”
But Kennedy insisted that the only way to defeat terrorism is to stay informed and move on with our lives.
“Live life fully,” she said. “Let’s enrich our lives, let’s be creative about the way we live.”