9-11 Nine Years Later: The Definition of Insanity

Creating new enemies?This is Part III of a five-part series on the ninth anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 attacks.

Since the attacks of September 11th, 2001 and their effects are the biggest issues of our time, they should not be discussed only briefly on or around that date, but the attacks and their implications should be explored and examined repeatedly until the problems we have created for ourselves are resolved.

It remains unclear whether Benjamin Franklin or Albert Einstein first said, "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."  If this quote is to be taken as truth, then our policy since September 11th, 2001 is insane.  Two principle direct, observable causes of the September 11th attacks were (1) bureaucratic incompetence - a lack of communication between the FBI and the CIA resulted in the terrorists who perpetrated the September 11th attacks falling off the grid and not re-emerging until mid-flight; and (2) aggressive policy in the Middle East - the Middle East is a fairly complicated place.  By playing politics with the Middle East, basically breaking it up into meaningless nation states - meaningless because the Middle East is largely organized along tribal or ethnic lines - we created power vacuums, which usually we tried to micromanage by supporting dictators loyal to us over the Soviets.  This stirred up grassroots hatred and caused otherwise disparate peoples to organize and unite around mutual anti-Americanism (for example, Iran's fervent support for Palestine, al Qaeda in Afghanistan).  It might have turned out differently if, while maintaining a firm grip on political control of the region, we had also encouraged economic and infrastructure development in conjunction with intra-regional competition (our East Asia strategy under MacArthur).     

America's solutions to the problems of complex and ineffective bureaucracy at home and grassroots hatred abroad manifest in the attacks of September 11th, 2001 was to create the largest new bureaucracy since World War II while simultaneously increasing belligerence in the Middle East.  Or, our solutions were to create more of the same problems for ourselves.  From Fareed Zakaria:

Here are some of the highlights. Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. The amount of money spent on intelligence has risen by 250 percent, to $75 billion (and that’s the public number, which is a gross underestimate). That’s more than the rest of the world spends put together. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet—the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. Five miles southeast of the White House, the largest government site in 50 years is being built—at a cost of $3.4 billion—to house the largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs: the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.

Some 30,000 people are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications in the United States. And yet no one in Army intelligence noticed that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had been making a series of strange threats at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he trained. The father of the Nigerian “Christmas bomber” reported his son’s radicalism to the U.S. Embassy. But that message never made its way to the right people in this vast security apparatus. The plot was foiled only by the bomber’s own incompetence and some alert passengers

How can anyone justify doubling down on what was already so clearly a bad bet? A 2004 Ron Suskind New York Times Magazine article sums up the kind of thinking that may be behind it all:

The (Bush White House) aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” ... “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality-judiciously, as you will-we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”  

Well, fair enough.  We're an empire, we control our own destiny, we make the world in our image - quite full of hubris, and perhaps still technically true even in the wake of the Iraq War debacle: but it seems we're not so much the empire of Marcus Aurelius or Julian as we are the empire of Nero or Caligula.  Would that the Iraqi people had but one neck!  

What we call "neoconservative" is actually the violent eschatology of Marxism tempered with the oversimplified objectivist morality of fundamentalist Christianity.  What percentage of Americans would describe themselves as or vote for a "Marxist Christian Fundamentalist"?  Not too many.  But essentially, that is our Republican leadership.  

And just as those Romans who strove against Nero and Caligula did so out of a strong patriotism and a love for the first principles that made their great society, so must patriotic Americans strive against the insane state of affairs that continues to provide our lives with meaning; the status quo is unsustainable; the War on Terror has taken over our lives like a cancer; we must return to a true focus on life, liberty, and property.

The goal of any terrorist attack is provoke insanity.  Scott Horton writes in Harpers that we can do a lot to mitigate the effects of 9-11 by simply not overreacting any more:

The German philosophy, which is close to that of the United Kingdom and the New York City Police Department (explained by my friend Mike Shaheen here), runs something like this: the aim of terrorists is to instill fear and to disrupt lives. Therefore it is only doing the terrorists’ bidding when a government makes statements that generally spread anxiety without providing any specific guidance. The approach of these governments is thus to share the basic information but to downplay its significance (usually by stressing that the information is general, that it shows planning but that there is no specific information about an attack). They urge people to go about their lives and to report suspicious activity to the police. Quietly, law enforcement and intelligence agencies will follow up leads, interrogating individuals and making arrests. Generally speaking, however, the aim is to get a good look inside the terrorist cell and follow its threads from within, not moving too quickly. The theory is that, once alerted, the terrorists are less likely to reveal the full scope of their plans or their support network.

We could make similar progress by simply understanding our enemy, as opposed to dehumanizing him.  From Glenn Greenwald:

Isn't Muslim culture just so bizarre, primitive, and inscrutable?  As strange as it is, they actually seem to dislike it when foreign militaries bomb, invade and occupy their countries, and Western powers interfere in their internal affairs by overthrowing and covertly manipulating their governments, imposing sanctions that kill hundreds of thousands of Muslim children, and arming their enemies.  Therefore (of course), the solution to Terrorism is to interfere more in their countries by continuing to occupy, bomb, invade, assassinate, lawlessly imprison and control them, because that's the only way we can Stay Safe.  There are people over there who are angry at us for what we're doing in their world, so we need to do much more of it to eradicate the anger.  That's the core logic of the War on Terror.  How is that workingout?

As Timothy B. Lee, Conor Friedersdorf, and Jason Kuznicki have gone to great lengths to show, the Obama Administration has been even more authoritarian that Bush in its assertion of a wide variety of Presidential powers.  From Friedersdorf:

The United States is not on the brink of turning into Oceania, or even Singapore. But anyone with their eyes open ought to notice that the United States is already too close for comfort to “knocks in the night” and “jackbooted thugs.” Even worse, most Americans are either ignorant of that fact, or else unconcerned by truly egregious state behavior. This blindness is particularly striking among conservatives, who are constantly worrying about lost liberty, and looking for its leading indicators in all the wrong places. But it is a bi-partisan and cross-ideological myopia. 

As much as I would like to see the War on Terror - like the Wars on Crime and Drugs - either completely eliminated or scaled back to prudently manageable levels, change will likely never happen for political reasons: no politician wants to be in a position to take the blame when the next terrorist attack occurs, and another attack will occur so long as we are active in the Middle East; so our dedication to absurd War on Terror laws inappropriate for the real, relatively insignificant threats we face, will remain out way past the margin of reasonable returns.  

From a political perspective, Cheney was absolutely correct to base policy on a worst-case scenario.  Imagine instead of terror alerts and making everybody go through strange security dances whenever they traveled anywhere, the Bush Administration had instead adopted the aforementioned German strategy.  There is a terrorist attack; the Democrats pounce on the Republicans for being "soft on terror" and that party is finished. 

If instead whoever is in charge makes it clear to everybody that the country faces another possible attack any day now by constantly reminding them of this danger throughout the course of their day-to-day lives, then when there is an attack of any kind, whoever is in charge can considerably play up the strength of our enemies by saying something along the lines of, "See!  We told you the terrorists hate freedom!  They got to us even though we all had to take our shoes off and we couldn't bring liquids on airplanes!"

Essentially, the reason why the War on Terror will never end is the same reason why the War on Drugs will never end and the same reason America will continue to have far and away the world's largest prison population: there is little for politicians to gain personally from supporting reasonable policies, and there is always the chance of being labeled, "soft on terror".  Basically, we are being held hostage by our own politics.  In a democracy, this should strike the reader as fundamentally immoral.

Political problems have political solutions.  From Zakaria: 

...Mistakes might be excusable. But the rise of this national-security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touches every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. The most chilling aspect of Dave Eggers’s heartbreaking book, Zeitoun, is that the federal government’s fastest and most efficient response to Hurricane Katrina was the creation of a Guantánamo-like prison facility (in days!) in which 1,200 American citizens were summarily detained and denied any of their constitutional rights for months, a suspension of habeas corpus that reads like something out of a Kafka novel.

In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority, and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is a war without end. When do we declare victory? When do the emergency powers cease?

Conservatives are worried about the growing power of the state. Surely this usurpation is more worrisome than a few federal stimulus programs.

Do we place our hope with the Tea Party?  God help us if we have to do that.  For now, neither party seems to be comfortable with scaling back the War on Terror.  To do so is a complete political loser.  Obama campaigned and won on promises of vast sweeping changes to all the Bush Administration policies the American people disliked so much.  The Administration is still in its second year, but so far there has definitely been no change when it comes to the War on Terror.  And with Republicans set to take Congress, why would the Obama Administration ever choose to die on that battlefield?