9-11 Nine Years Later: Getting Past "Is"

I was seventeen years old when the Twin Towers fell, in the last year of my secondary education.  I was sitting in front of an iMac managing a stock portfolio of 100,000 imaginary dollars.  It was 8:45 in the morning, and my economics class had reserved the computer lab at Corcoran Library of Boston College High School.  I was looking at Yahoo Finance for stock tips, and my partner for the Stock Market Game was reading CNN.com, trying to translate news stories into investments.  

Minutes after the first plane flew into the North Tower, it was on his screen.  It must have been a computer malfunction, we thought, a tragic accident.  The Y2K hysteria was still fresh on our minds, and it was probably this that led everybody (at least every seventeen-year-old in the computer lab) instantly to such a conclusion.  When the second plane crashed into the South Tower about fifteen minutes later, we thought no differently.  The machines were clearly out of control.  There was never a grounding in reality.  There was never a grand realization.  We were all living in a fantasy world created by the mass media; a world which we didn't know would become even more fantastic.  We were the quintessential children of the nineties: breakfast, school, football practice, dinner, homework, AIM, Napster, bed, breakfast, school, football practice, dinner, homework, AIM, Napster, bed... 

I'm twenty-six now, and for the past nine years my generation has largely continued to stand on the sidelines and watch a public conversation which seems incoherent.  From our sheltered, privileged, structured childhoods we were suddenly and viscerally exposed to a destabilizing truth.  We suspect that there may be something fundamentally odd and wrong about what happened on September 11th, 2001; and we suspect that there may be something fundamentally odd and wrong about what has happened since; but the world of the War on Terror and the USAPATRIOT Act is all we really know as adults, so we wonder if it isn't perhaps the way things have always been, or whether it is simply beyond our control.  Hence the existential dread.

During our university years, we were called out by old left culture warriors for being apathetic and indifferent, privileged and selfish; but I prefer to think the information generation is simply collecting information to use when it's our turn to build a better world.  Here is some of that information vis-a-vis September 11th, 2001.

From the best mainstream voices:  

Overreaction is the Terrorist’s Friend: Even in major cases like this, the terrorist’s real weapon is fear and hysteria. Overreacting will play into their hands - Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit), September 11, 2001.

The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams...

We have raced to Afghanistan and Iraq, and more recently to Yemen and Somalia; we have created a swollen national security apparatus; and we are so absorbed in our own fury and so oblivious to our enemy's intentions that we inflate the building of an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan into a national debate and watch, helpless, while a minister in Florida outrages even our friends in the Islamic world by threatening to burn copies of the Koran. - Ted Koppel, Nine years after 9/11, let's stop playing into bin Laden's hands

Crazy, murderous violence hasn’t spread across the land. But unreason, cheered on by cable news, has won the day. We have undeniably gone sour on interfaith tolerance. We have turned inward in sullen exhaustion. The staggering chain of consequences and characters that followed 9/11—Kabul, Tora Bora, Daniel Pearl, John Yoo, Bagram, Guantánamo, Baghdad, Sergio Vieira de Mello, Madrid, Falluja, Abu Ghraib, Nick Berg, London, Zarqawi, military commissions, Samarra, eavesdropping, Sean Hannity, the Taliban’s return, Benazir Bhutto, Mumbai, Hakimullah Mehsud—seems like a fever dream of can-you-top-this atrocities from which we can’t wake up. The bill is finally coming due at home. It turned out that the Bush rhetoric of religious understanding and freedom was a lot less potent and durable than the Bush policies. - George Packer, Should the Dream Ever Sour

We already know the numbers. Pew finds that 18% of Americans believe President Obama is a Muslim. A new Newsweek poll, taken after the controversy over the New York mosque, places that figure at 24%. Even if he's not a Muslim, Newsweek finds, 31 percent think it's "definitely or probably" true that Obama "sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world."

When the focus is narrowed to Republicans, a Harris poll finds 57 percent of party members believe he is a Muslim, 22% believe he "wants the terrorists to win," and 24% believe he is the Antichrist. - Roger Ebert, Put Up or Shut Up

Andrew Sullivan on the torture regime:

Torture gives false information. And the worst scenarios that tortured detainees coughed up - many of them completely innocent, remember - may well have come to fuel US national security policy. And of course they also fueled more torture. Because once you hear of the existential plots confessed by one tortured prisoner, you need to torture more prisoners to get at the real truth. We do not know what actual intelligence they were getting, and Cheney has ensured that we will never know. But it is perfectly conceivable that the torture regime - combined with panic and paranoia - created an imaginationland of untruth and half-truth that has guided US policy for this entire war. It may well have led to the president being informed of any number of plots that never existed, and any number of threats that are pure imagination. And once torture has entered the system, you can never find out the real truth. You are lost in a vortex of lies and fears. In this vortex, the actual threats that we face may well be overlooked or ignored, as we chase false leads and pursue non-existent WMDs.

We may have entered a world, in other words, where the empirical reality of our national security is less important than the imaginationland that every torture regime will create. We may therefore be sacrificing our liberties for a phantasm created by brutality spawned by terror. We don't know for sure, of course. But that's what torture does: it creates a miasma of unknowing, about as dangerous a situation in wartime as one can imagine. This hideous fate was made possible by an inexperienced president with a fundamentalist psyche and a paranoid and power-hungry vice-president who decided to embrace "the dark side" almost as soon as the second tower fell, and who is still trying to avenge Nixon. Until they are both gone from office, we are in grave danger - the kind of danger that only torturers and fantasists and a security strategy based on coerced evidence can conjure up. And since they have utter contempt for the role of the Congress in declaring war, we and the world are helpless to stop them. Every day we get through with them in power, I say a silent prayer of thanks that the worst hasn't happened. Yet. Because we sure know they're looking in all the wrong places. - Andrew Sullivan, Imaginationland

On the failures of our military strategy:

The American obsession with this region in the wake of 9/11 is understandable. Nine years later, with no clear end in sight, the question is whether this continued focus is strategically rational for the United States. Given the uncertainties of the first few years, obsession and uncertainty are understandable, but as a long-term U.S. strategy — the long war that the U.S. Department of Defense is preparing for — it leaves the rest of the world uncovered...

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. Certainly, resources must be devoted to combating the threat and, to the extent possible, disrupting it. But it must also be recognized that terrorism cannot always be blocked, that terrorist attacks will occur and that the world’s only global power cannot be captive to this single threat. - George Friedman, 9/11 and the 9-Year War

For almost a decade, America's political leaders have convinced themselves that a small group of fugitives on the run in Pakistan poses a bigger challenge to America's place in the world than the economic transformation of the world's most populous nation. Future historians will find that hard to explain. - Hugh White, Power Shift

And for a more acerbic take:

9/11 was a stark and horrible day in the life of this comfortable country. Since that awful event on a crisp September day, a day just like today in fact, the people of this besotted nation have descended into a state of confused mental undress that begs the fine services of a Swift or Rabelais. The only thing we get however is a Glen Beck or Rachel Maddow. In other words, we get bupkus. We get spare change. We get a relentless bait and switch. We are treated to a constant barrage of nervous prodding with high production values.

Even Satan has lost his faith. I hear on good authority from the cemeteries of New Orleans that the Horned One is adrift like a bowery drunk amongst the crypts of that voodoo town. Like a growing percentage of the population, he’s lost his job and has been downsized. There is no challenge in grasping for souls who show such a profound inclination toward decline already. There is no fun in the harvesting of sinners in America any longer because even its’ pastors are amateurishly evil while our jackanapes leaders are a feckless lot bestride an increasingly destructive Leviathan. There is no guile in the harvesting of these sorts of fallen mortals, no skill. Never has commending so many to Hell become so boring. Hell hath no mystery to such a rabble. In fact, to some, it may come as a relief. At least Hell is professional. - D.W. Sabin, A Brief History of Time Wasted (definitely worth reading in its entirety.)

In addition to these excerpts, James Fallows has written extensively on the topic here, here, and here.

It seems America remains clearly, dedicatedly, and stupidly on course to self-destruction, and the main reason is that the Rudy Giuliani notion that people are blaming the U.S. for 9/11 by stating the 100% uncontested facts in conjunction with our own C.I.A., and the aforementioned extremely knowledgeable pundits from both sides and everywhere in between that the attacks of September 11th were a direct and predictable response to our own foreign policy still has traction.  The same culture that is now mobilizing for the Clash of Civilizations has as a litmus test that one must feign willful ignorance of the facts surrounding 9/11 or else one is un-American.  To wit, our public discussion is a complete farce.  

The weeds of security state totalitarianism continue to creep into the garden of meaningful human experience, while we focus increasingly on which minority groups to persecute, Sarah Palin's wardrobe, the philosophical roots of marriage, American Idol, what individuals can be allowed to do with their own bodies, and which countries to invade next.  We ignore empirical fact and concentrate instead on a wild goose chase of ideas and essences to our own detriment. 

Osama bin Laden is John Dillinger with better technology.  And here's the thing: John Dillinger's death did not end the War on Crime.  That war continues to this day.  But at least it's a war on a thing, and not a war on an abstract idea.  Why would we ever assume that capturing bin Laden or even a dead bin Laden would suddenly cause everything to go back to normal, with civil liberties and all, and without everyone a suspect?  The War on Terror will continue until some martyr politician commits career suicide or the nation goes bankrupt, or the people wake up and actively start fighting for their own civil liberties and the presumption of innocence instead of taking out loans from China to devote our hard-won civilization to something that kills only a few hundred people every year.