The 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks seems to have catalyzed a broad assessment among even middle-of-the-road political observers that the overall American response to the attacks has had dire consequences that stretch far beyond foreign policy, warping the fabric of American life and the nature of our politics. I’ve been startled to read pieces like this one by Stephen Collinson at the CNN website, which includes the observation that, “[T]he thousands of deaths and injuries in foreign wars, the trillions of dollars spent on nation building, fury at Washington elites and prejudice against Islam brewed a pool of resentment ripe for a demagogue. And along came Donald Trump.” Even George W. Bush seemed to gesture at the connection between the war and the rise of political extremism in the U.S., though I doubt that Bush would ever accept responsibility for this terrible domestic development. No doubt the coincidence of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan just weeks ago has focused minds and attention in a way that the 20th anniversary alone may not have — as has the recent publication of Spencer Ackerman’s Reign of Terror: How 9/11 Destabilized America and Produced Trump, which has created a strong framework for critical thinking about 9/11 and the war on terror.
I haven’t done any sort of exhaustive reading of 9/11 commentary over the past few weeks, but I’ve read some excellent and informative pieces discussing the folly of the global war on terror, including the above-mentioned piece by Collinson; this damning essay by Garrett Graff; this very Vox-like piece at Vox by Dylan Matthews evaluating whether the global war on terror has been worth the cost; and interviews of Spencer Ackerman by Sean Illing, Chris Hayes, and Ezra Klein that provide a good distillation of Ackerman’s Reign of Terror.
However, there are several points that I haven’t seen given the attention they merit, particularly in mainstream coverage of the 20th anniversary of 9/11; collectively, I believe these under-discussed threads help explain, at least in part, why the dire consequences of 9/11 continue to ramify even as consciousness of the ill effects of the war on terror has never been higher.
First, the continued insistence that Americans were “unified” for some time after 9/11 confuses the collective horror and resulting activation of basic patriotic sentiment (“we’re all in this together”) with how the Bush administration quickly warped this unity into a cudgel to attack its political opponents and build support for the disastrous war in Iraq (“you’re either with us or against us”). It is the difference between an organic sense of feeling united in the face of a great horror and harm, and a political administration consciously constructing a politics in which to oppose the administration was to oppose America. In the months and years after 9/11, the latter form of unity quickly replaced the former. And in the way that the Bush administration channeled remaining feelings of solidarity into a thirst for revenge to support its political goals, whatever sense of unity remained became indistinguishable from embracing a dark and unhealthy set of impulses that included rage, paranoia, and bloodlust.
The perversion of American unity points to a second aspect of 9/11’s aftermath that remains deeply repressed: despite the very real Bush administration interest in using the attacks to enact a vision of America as a sort of hyperpower astride the globe, the administration and its allies in the Republican Party were even more enraptured by how they could ride conquest and perpetual war into dominance in American politics. Promoting the idea that anyone who opposed the Bush administration’s radical decisions to occupy Afghanistan and invade Iraq was disloyal and un-American wasn’t just a way to maintain support for its foreign adventures; it was a way to shape American politics so that to oppose the Bush administration on any issue was to oppose America itself. A central goal was to stomp the living bejesus out of the Democrats by either making them passive bystanders of the Bush vision, or into despicable enemies of America; either way, the GOP would come out ahead. The ultimate distillation of this strategy was Bush’s now-infamous declaration of victory in Iraq a mere two months after the American invasion, in which a “Mission Accomplished” banner was unfurled across the bridge of the USS Abraham Lincoln as Bush landed on the carrier’s flight deck and announced the end of major combat operations in that country. The fact that Bush’s use of war as a conscious political strategy ended up backfiring, as the disaster of Iraq became impossible to deny, renders his form of hypernationalist, authoritarian politics no less despicable.
Twenty years on, the country also seems unwilling to admit the basic immorality at the heart of the war on terror ignited by 9/11: the idea that any number of non-Americans, whether terrorists or civilians, can legitimately be killed so long as it’s done in the name of keeping Americans safe. In a better country, the nature of the 9/11 attacks would have led to the opposite conclusion: that the only way to respond to such barbarism was to avoid mirroring the terrorists’ own inhumanity at all costs, to do everything possible to make sure that the only people harmed in the American response were those who deserved it, and to take every precaution to avoid the loss of civilian life. The brutality and nihilism of al-Qaeda’s attacks called for any American response to repudiate indiscriminate violence. Instead, the Bush administration determined to out-terrorize the terrorists, embarking on wars that to date have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents, displaced millions more, and consumed $8 trillion in U.S. spending.
The indifference to mass civilian death, not only by the war on terror's executors, but also by too many Americans, is closely linked to the essential racism of the war. Brown-skinned people overseas are simply not considered fully human, or at least as human as Americans, which is a distinction without a difference. This aspect of the war on terror remain broadly unacknowledged.
Finally, the war represented a tragic mis-assessment of the dangers most threatening the United States in the 21st century. By elevating the threat posed by future Islamist terror attacks to an existential level, U.S. policymakers enmeshed the country in a global war on terror that continues to the present day, despite the withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan. This war preoccupied the nation even as a true existential threat was allowed to gather force while the country dawdled: and so, in the two decades after 9/11, traumatic climate change moved from possibility to inevitability, as the U.S. and other nations of the world continued to emit carbon into the atmosphere without meaningful measures to slow or stop the damage. Now the necessary response to climate change may yet involve a war-like mobilization of the United States, but of a far different kind than the global war on terror: one that seeks alliances and the input of friends; is based on the preservation and equality of all human life; and requires the dropping of not a single bomb.