Ten Years On
The observances of the 10th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks largely focused, as they should have, on the victims of those attacks. In showing the capacity of ordinary people to exhibit extraordinary courage, many of these individuals exemplified the best of our country and the best of the human spirit.
Nevertheless, I suspect that one of the reasons that the ceremonies and media coverage focused so heavily on the stories of the victims is that we remain deeply divided about our national response to these attacks. With Bin Laden dead, Al-Qaeda a shadow of its former self, and the U.S. homeland free of any major terrorist attacks over the last decade one might be inclined to see the Global War on Terror as a success.
I would argue, to the contrary, that our victory over Al-Qaeda was a tactical victory but something close to a strategic defeat. Ten years after Pearl Harbor, the United States was the most powerful nation on earth. Working with its allies, the U.S. built durable international institutions that strengthened liberal democracy and laid the groundwork for the long twilight struggle against Communism. Domestically, the expansion of collective bargaining allowed the prosperity of the post-war period to be broadly shared.
The contrast with the present moment is striking.
We are—economically, politically, socially—a weaker nation than we were 10 years ago. There are many reasons for this and some of them have little to do with the War on Terror. There is no question, though, that we have paid an enormous price—perhaps an excessive one—in an effort to eliminate the chance of another mass casualty attack on American soil.
Exhibits A and B, of course, are the actual wars we have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. In both cases, military victory was quickly followed by something perilously close to political defeat at an enormous cost in lives and resources. But there have been more subtle impacts as well. I write this from an airplane, having gone through airport security four times in the past two weeks. Making it harder to travel in and out of the United States has depressed tourism and made us less attractive as a place to do business. The greater scrutiny and lengthy delays associated with visas has made it harder to attract the best and brightest from the around the world to study, live and start businesses here. The conviction that we had no choice but to employ torture and “extraordinary rendition” to protect ourselves did enormous harm to our standing abroad and made it harder for other governments to stand with us.
The irony is that protecting ourselves from terrorist attacks did not require this kind of response. Much of our progress in dismantling Al-Qaeda has come from the kind of dogged “police work” often derided by those who favored a more muscular response: better international collaboration between intelligence agencies and between those agencies and law enforcement; understanding and interrupting the monetary flows that finance terrorist activity; successful infiltration of terrorist networks and, yes, targeted military action against individual terrorist leaders. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have, if anything, complicated this work. As for the burdens imposed on the travelling public, they have been justly criticized as an extremely expensive form of “anti-terrorism theater.”
If anything, our response to the 9-11 attacks handed Al-Qaeda a victory, although one they were admittedly unable to adequately exploit. While Bin Laden’s core motivation in attacking the U.S. was to weaken our support for the Arab governments he opposed, it was also clear that he sought the mantle of being the great opponent to the United States. Our response gave him a stature his tiny organization of fanatics did not deserve. It was as if the President of the United States had agreed to a televised public debate with Lyndon LaRouche. It might have been better if we had taken a page from the Israeli response to the killings at the Munich Olympics and quietly hunted down the killers one by one.
While I am sometimes amused by the fact that the United States has rendered the third ranking position in Al-Qaeda the most dangerous job in the world, the fact remains that we have more important work to do. The dangers facing the United States at the present time are more domestic than foreign: unprecedented levels of long-term unemployment that are destroying both hope and human capital; rising poverty and falling incomes; a slowing pace of technological innovation; schools and colleges that are failing to prepare the workers and citizens of the future; public sector budgets groaning under the weight of an aging population; and an inadequate policy response to the very real threat of climate change.
These are the real threats that we face right now. If we do not confront them successfully, it will matter little ten years hence that we put a bullet in the head of a madman who will eventually lie forgotten in the garbage heap of history.
Strategic defeat?
There are either established democratic governments or democratic movements in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, and all across the Muslim world. Westernization has been a dagger in the heart of the radical Islamist region.
“Dogged police work,” arresting those engaged in warfare against us, trying them in civilian courts, and leaving it up to juries to do to job of the military, would not have brought freedom and democracy to the long-suffering people of the Middle East and northern Africa.
I don’t think you can blame American cultural and economic decline on Iraq and Afghanistan and on the waning influence of labor unions. It’s much more complex and nuanced than all that.
America’s golden years after the World War II were due largely to the rest of the developed world’s having been destroyed. That was bound to pass. We should have planned for that day more wisely than we did.
How would you have had the government react to 9/11? Simply do quiet police work – no attacking the bases in Afghanistan?
I suspect that much of the clumsy reaction to 9/11 was due to lack of experience. We’d never been attacked on our home soil like that before. It must have been quite a shock to the intelligence people, to have seen it coming yet to have planned against it so poorly. We were naifs in need of a wake-up call. It could have been much worse, of course – in a sense we were lucky that it was just a few buildings and a few thousand people. Unfortunately, the government doesn’t seem to have profited very well from the shock. As you say, the TSA is, apparently, largely security theater – just, as I think an Israeli security expert once said, a way to bother people without acquiring real security.
The principal problem now, perhaps, is lack of focus, lack of a sense of what needs to be done, and lack of a will to do it. We seem to be floundering – dull, fat, lazy people waddling through shopping malls, waiting for the government to come up with some easy solution.
@Bender (9/15, 2:50 am) Implying that “democratic governments or democratic movements…all across the Muslim world” are a result of the US response to 9/11 is akin to, oh, I don’t know, giving Bull Connor and Sheriff Clark credit for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights act. You can make the case, but in the end it’s an almost willful missing of the point.
@David Smith (9/15, 3:08 am) With its 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda hoped to provoke the US into a costly and prolonged overreaction that would, in the end, be a strategic defeat for the US. I think it’s safe to say that the Bush administration—in launching an offensive war against Iraq—overreacted badly.
It’s not hard to imagine a different reaction, even for the Bush administration. Assuming but by no means conceding (to use a favorite phrase of a lawyer-friend) that Bush made the right decision in declaring war on Afghanistan, he could have prosecuted that war more vigorously, with a greater focus on capturing or killing bin Laden and the rest of al-Qaeda’s top leadership. Given how quickly the US had bin Laden trapped at Tora Bora, it’s easy to imagine an alternate history in which a “splendid little war”, not much larger than, say, Grenada, crushed al-Qaeda, toppled the Taliban, and allowed the US to invest trillions of dollars domestically rather than in wars stretching into their second decade.
As for “the intelligence people”, for the record, there does seem to be a general consensus that they saw something coming, alerted the president (8/6/01), and then were effectively constrained from taking further action by his disinterest in their reports.
“The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have, if anything, complicated this work. ”
In defense of the President however, our police operations in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Libya have in fact had a rather deleterious effect on leaders and operatives from the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and associated, allied, or related extremist groups and their sympathizers.
Why apologists for Obama feel the need to constantly, and somewhat gratuitously, attack LaRouche is, after all these years, something that still suprises me. Yet, the most interesting thing about this article is what it doesn’t say.
It does not, for example, indicate that LaRouche warned about the threat of a “Riechtag Fire” incident from the incoming Bush/Cheney administration on January 3 2001. It does not report on the 28 pages of evidence developed by the Congressional investigation of 911 which were classified “top secret” first by Bush, then Obama.
These 28 pages deeply implicate Saudi interests in the financing of 911. It does not cover the fact that on the 10th anniversary of 911, Lloyds of London is now suing the Saudi government, the Saudi Royal family, and Saudi business interests in the financing of Al-Qaeda to the tune of 30 billions per year for more than ten years preceding 911.
It is this we should learn 10 years later. We all mourned the murders of the Kennedies. We all mourned the murder of Dr. King. Yet, in the over fifty years since their murders, the actual culprits have never been brought to justice; th e conspiracies and coverups never exposed. This is the appropropriate response to the 10th anniversary of 911. Bring the actual conspirators, to powerful to be judged, to judgement.
Luke -
I agree with you that it is too-simplistic to suggest a cause-effect between the US’s post 9/11 military response and “the Arab Spring,” but your analogy to Bull Connor and that post 9/11 military response is a bit much.
I think both Press. Bush & Obama deserve credit for, in my view, the successes America has had in the intervening 10 years, and I think both parties deserve some blame for the messes that have ensued. After all, large numbers of Democrats voted in favor of many of the Bush Administration’s early post 9/11 measures (lest they look like Ron Paul) and I think Obama has refined, but not dramatically curtailed, those policies. Certainly the increased number of drone attacks in the last few years, and the willingness to unilaterally invade Pakistan to kill Bin Laden are related in kind (nor would I consider these actions routine “police work.”) At the same time, both parties bought into the Silicon Valley exuberance, followed by the low interest rates of the mid-90s into the 2000s, and enacted policies that we know now were detrimental to long-term economic stability. I think we forget that politicians do not act in a vacuum – many of these proposals for good and bad have been responsive to public pressure, so we, too, deserve some of the blame.
I don’t expect anyone to agree with this, but fwiw: without wishing to minimize what happened on 9/11, it is quite easy to overstate its importance. Very few American lives were lost in the three wars that have followed in the wake of the airplane crashes. For those of us who don’t live in NY or Washington, the most concrete impact it has had on our lives is longer security lines at airports – a minor nuisance in the scheme of things. Even within the context of war, our troop commitment levels and casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts are a fraction of what they were in WWII, Korea and Vietnam. The 10 year remembrance has been an almost entirely media-driven event.
Regarding our relationship with our allies: without wishing to indicate any support for torture and rendition, it would be a mistake to blame those post-9/11 phenomena for the timorousness of our allies to actually help us. My recollection is that, in the wake of 9/11, only the British and, to a lesser extent, Canada were ready, among our traditional NATO allies, to make a substantial commitment of blood and treasure to the clearly-justifiable war to unseat the Taliban. Not that we needed Germany, France, Italy or (after the railway station bombings) Spain, but it would have been nice. The seeds of their unwillingness – and I use that word literally; their failure of will – to come to an ally’s aid had been sown decades before 9/11. European fecklessness can’t be laid at the doorstep of the US or 9/11.
I don’t agree that we’re weaker economically and politically than we were ten years ago. Ten years ago, our GDP was less than it is now; and politically, we were emerging ten years ago from a genuine constitutional crisis precipitated by the Gore campaign. I agree that we are weaker socially than we were ten years ago, but the same could have been said ten years ago in comparison to twenty years ago, and twenty years ago in comparison to thirty. Arguably, the national reaction to 9/11 stanched the bleeding for a short time.
As for the domestic challenges that confront us now, mostly of an economic variety – the dichotomy between foreign and domestic issues is, if not an entirely false dichotomy, not entirely true, either, because a number of the economic headwinds are originating overseas. The incipient failures of social-democratic experiments in Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Ireland are destabilizing the worldwide financial sectors, and cheaper overseas labor is rendering American labor, their wages inflated in part by collective bargaining, uncompetitive. I’ve been skeptical for quite some time – and have commented to this effect here in the past – that the federal government possesses any fiscal tools that can singlehandedly overcome these forces. At this time, it seems questionable that the Obama Administration will be granted another four years to apply its discredited economic policies. Perhaps a Perry or Romney administration will have better success.
Jim is right: I hope noone agrees with him either.
I think that HP Peter’s final patagraph is spot on.
We are weaker economically – look at the shape we are in and IMO becoming more and more a second rate plutocracy, and politically, deeply divided even more with the rise of the Tea Party and again IMO its lunacy exemplified by Perry and Bachman.
Tp describe, BTW Jim, the Obama economic policies as discredited is both partisan and unsubstantiated.
But what do I expect in any political discusion here?
David S. –
As usual, the reasons for the economic “golden age” after WWII were complex. One of the main reasons was the GI Bill which provided further education for the veterans, including 4 years of free college plus stipends, even including money for dependents. Of course, the veterans were poor by our standards, but college life was a lot better than the Army.
Millions of the young men were the first college graduates in their families, and the were the backbone of the new economic system.
These days a kid is saddled with an average of $16,ooo of loans the day he/she graduates, and they often have few job prospects. Is it any wonder our economy is stagnating? Actually, I read not long ago that there *are* technological jobs that are not being filled because there aren’t enough trained people.
(By the way, a small ray of hope — the New Orleans/Louisiana education scores came out today. Miracle. In the New Orleans charter schools the kids are now scoring above the national average. By one measure the black kids have improved 75% over the last 6 years. But don’t trust my fighters. See the articles at today’s Times-Picayune.)
(Sorry I can’t post the address, and sorry for this phone’s added typos which invariably appear after I’ve sent the message. Grrrr.)
Ann (9/15 10:44 pm), there may now be a glut of college-educated kids on the street. With everyone having acquired at birth a right to a college education, the first degree is now something like a high-school degree. A very expensive one, but a sine qua non. I suppose before long, we’ll discover that everyone has a right to a free college degree. That would be a logical consequence of what’s happened. Unintended consequences: when you give away something that was heretofore hard to come by, it loses a lot of its value. It might have been much simpler and cheaper to simply teach a lot more in those twelve years of high school. Much of that time is wasted now.
Doesn’t that have to do with American kids not being willing to follow science and math work in university to advanced degrees? That need could be filled fairly easily, as I understand, if the government would simply make visas available for foreign talent.
David S. –
Colleges after WWIi didn’t accept the ill-prepared high school students they accept today, a nd they didn’t have grade inflation. So the quality of education wAs better except that sciences were not required to the same extent. So, I think you’re right, a lot of money is wasted now on inferior education — both in high schools and colleges.
Note that the colleges are totally dependent on the high schools for the point at which college level work starts –unless acollege hassplendid remedial help available, but that too is a waste — the learning should have happened in high school.
You don’t sole the problems of American education with foreigners. You might te
Temporarily solve American *business* problems. But that doesn’t help American students.
Your assumption shows that you have separated the welfare of ordinary American kids from the welfare of American businesses interests. Shame on you.
Ann (9/16 10:05 am):
Indeed. In this as in many other things.
However, I didn’t mean to suggest that American kids should be given a pass – that it was OK for them to be lazy pleasure seekers. Our educational systems need lots of work. Parts of them are getting it. Perhaps the salutary changes will gradually percolate down into the rest of the schools.
What was this thread about originally? Ah:
Interesting how these things wander.