Why? That was the question the barrage of television images of Tuesday's horror did not and could not answer.

CNN, for all its astonishing technical and personnel resources and international reach, looked, during the endless hours most of us spent watching it, exactly like the dangerously enclosing medium that it is. So busy with empathy and effect, so resolutely shy of questions about cause.

Not that empathy was inappropriate: there can be few people in the world who did not feel for those who died or those who lost kin in such a dreadful way - so sudden, so apocalyptic. But it is for those very people that one wants more by way of explanation, some extended, dispassionate, wise analysis that might lead the way to real change, to peace, not just to the reflexes of military counterstrike.

George W. Bush's vow that America would "whip terrorism" was as frightening as it was banal. Frightening because it signalled no real understanding of the place America occupies in the imaginations and in the fears of much of the world, particularly - though by no means exclusively - the Arab world. Banal because it was cowboy-book rhetoric, a language that reduces fraught international relations to a formulaic battle between goodies and baddies. "Good will prevail," Bush promised. Yes, one devoutly hopes that it will, but the world is not a John Ford movie and neither America, nor George W., the man who so narrowly scraped home to his presidency, has a monopoly on the good.

America, through the CIA, once had a very different relationship - one of mutual benefit - with the same Osama bin Laden it is now naming as the terrorist devil incarnate. You might never have known that, watching CNN, though it is no state secret. That is the paradox of America: it can be a country as embroiled in realpolitik as any and yet still be beguiled by a conception of its own innocence and power for good. But there is an anxiety, too, about that innocence, and that power. Clive James, as much a fan of America as any Australian, made a telling outsider's remark about the paradox of the place in a 1993 essay (on Mark Twain, Journalist):

Angst at falling short of its dreams for itself has sapped the country's initial confidence that it could alter circumstances in its own favor: the lure of the ideal has stymied the practical.

It has been that double sense of America - a more honest understanding of the ideal and the real - that has been reflected in much of the public radio coverage that Australians have been able to hear in the past five days. Sometimes it has come from experienced outsiders looking in - like the veteran Middle East specialist and Independent correspondent Robert Fisk. Fisk invariably provides the kind of background and political context that helps you understand not just what has happened and why but how one might then proceed. CNN take note.

But it has been the American commentators who have been the most extraordinary, and affecting - in differing ways. Enough have been free of the myopia that afflicts American politics and diplomacy to make one ask why their talents and understanding have not been parlayed into national politics or statesmanship. But to answer that question you would need to spend more time than most of us have following the money trails in American politics.

Not all voices have been in unison - these were Americans after all. On ABC radio's PM, Henry Kissinger interpreted Tuesday's outrage as a wake-up call to arms. No argument, no explanation, just gravel-voiced certainty. Unsurprising, I suppose, from the man who oversaw the bombing of Cambodia. But it was, nonetheless, instructive to hear Kissinger and then President Bush over a succession of days. Who, one had to ask, is leading America now? Kissinger may be a spent force, but George W. Bush is no force at all.

On Tuesday night, four hours before the fuel-laden planes hit the World Trade Centre towers, I sat in a quiet Melbourne cafe reading a book about the fragmentation of American community life. It is called Bowling Alone and is by Robert Putnam, an American sociologist so thorough and thoughtful you would like to ask him home to dinner. His documented understanding of a great loss - of neighborliness, of concern for others - in his country would not yield an answer to the bald question, why was America so brutally attacked? But Putnam knows so much about America, and about how America can recover itself, that he has been, for me, prescient consolation in a terrible time.

Morag Fraser is the editor of Eureka Street.
E-mail: morag@jespub.jesuit.org.au