Today is September 11th. Cue the maudlin background music.
Now that nine years have passed, this horrible anniversary can mean whatever we want it to.
We woke up. We were confused. We were at war. Brown people hate us. We’re mocked. We’re unraveling. We’re firmly declining. We’re finding ourselves. We’re getting stronger. We’re becoming a police state. God, god, god, but, please, the right god.
Multiple Choice
Take your pick. Nine years later, much of that period seems dreamlike. My own memories are hazy. I remember the usual stuff: I was walking to work at Uniform Medical Plan in downtown Seattle. I caught snippets of conversation as I made my way through Westlake, and when I arrived, we all heard about it.
The internet’s usual news-sites ground to a halt. Drudge Report was the only one loading. It would have to do.
Was it the Chinese? What about the Russians? None of us knew a damned thing, so we fell back to our own hopelessly biased narratives. All we knew for sure was that (a) George W. Bush was a savior, or (b) George W. Bush wasn’t all that great, but he was all we had. Either way, deep criticisms went into deep freeze while we all cried.
Even The Onion wondered about what the hell they could do. Two weeks later, they were back.
I’ve limited my exposure to reflection pieces because, let’s face it, the big 10 year anniversary is right around the corner and we certainly love round numbers.
The Question
So, did we overreact to 9/11?
Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden’s terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda’s best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives. (Zakaria)
What becomes so striking about the United States after September 11—and the same may be said, perhaps a little less enthusiastically, of the Western Europeans—is how well-behaved Americans have been towards Muslim Americans. Cock-ups aside (and anyone who has worked in the internal-security or intelligence business knows that disheartening errors come with the turf in this very bureaucratic line of work), Americans have shown themselves to be models of tolerance, all the more given the insidiousness of the threat. (Gerecht)
I scoff a bit at Gerecht’s observation. It may actually be true of intelligence services, but the average citizen has no way of knowing. What average citizens do know is that a vocal minority of them are ensuring that more Muslim Americans sympathize, just a bit more, with those failed terrorists.
Great foresight, Tea Partiers. Obama is a Muslim. He’s not an American. His birth certificate is forged. He wants to re-establish the Caliphate. Muslims are evil. Where was your terrorism-outrage back when Evangelical Christians were bombing abortion clinics?
But liberally minded people shouldn’t feel smug. I heard all sorts of kooky shit about G.W. back in the day. Note: He cannot be the biggest simpleton on the planet and the mastermind of the grandest conspiracy and human history. Just sayin’.
So we are thoroughly confused. About ourselves. About our nation. About what the hell American means. We all know much less than we think. We don’t even know just how much individual presidents matter. Obama vetoed that bill: rain is coming.
Granted
Yes, we ridiculously overspent. Who knows what did or didn’t work. Who knows if any of it worked? But it’s so hard to dismiss our actions because you can’t actually try out counterfactuals. What’s done is done. All the messy reactions are part of done, too.
As expected, George Friedman has a more slantwise take on what 9/11 did to us: It turned us away from global issues toward regional issues. This has allowed other nations a bit of room to expand their interests. Russia couldn’t have invaded Georgia if we weren’t trapped in two theaters of a war.
But let me state a more radical thesis: The threat of terrorism cannot become the singular focus of the United States. Let me push it further: The United States cannot subordinate its grand strategy to simply fighting terrorism even if there will be occasional terrorist attacks on the United States. Three thousand people died in the 9/11 attack. That is a tragedy, but in a nation of over 300 million, 3,000 deaths
cannot be permitted to define the totality of national strategy. (Friedman)
It’s cold, hard geopolitics. But it’s also completely right. Love it or hate it, America is a global power. We run the international trade system and have our fingers in every damned pot on the planet.
But back to the feelings… Much as it nauseates me to say that italicized word, irony didn’t die on 9/11. It just put its head down.
The feelings matter because, I’m not sure if you’ve noticed lately, but lots of other things haven’t been going so well for our fellow citizens. Whether directly relevant or not, this loads the anniversary with more baggage.
In order to understand the last nine years you must understand the first 24 hours of the war — and recall your own feelings in those 24 hours. First, the attack was a shock, its audaciousness frightening. Second, we did not know what was coming next. The attack had destroyed the right to complacent assumptions. Were there other cells standing by in the United States? Did they have capabilities even more substantial than what they showed on Sept. 11? Could they be detected and stopped? Any American not frightened on Sept. 12 was not in touch with reality. Many who are now claiming that the United States overreacted are forgetting their own sense of panic. We are all calm and collected nine years after. (Friedman, Emphasis mine)
This is why, in the midst of our national temper tantrum, it’s useful to remember those feelings. I won’t pretend to agree with the drunken nationalism that many of my countrymen share, but any response must include empathy toward Muslim Americans, frustrated Tea Partiers, and anyone else.
It’s nothing resembling a solution, to be sure, but I struggle to get a handle on the cacophony of anger and emotion. It’s all I can find within reach.
