Like most Americans, I spent September 11, 2001, filled with both rage and dread. I wanted the United States to find and kill whoever had planned this attack on my country. I knew little about al-Qaeda, but whoever did this, I thought, must pay. As the shock of that day wore off, I began to wonder, as so many others did in America and around the world, Now what?
Saying this even 25 years later seems uncharitable, but after the attacks of 9/11, many Americans, and their government, panicked. Worse, the United States institutionalized this panic in the form of new priorities, new programs, and new agencies, so that even when the fear subsided, the intemperate policies driven by that fear remained. Over the next quarter century, America would spend trillions of dollars, pass draconian laws, create a behemoth of a new Cabinet department, militarize law enforcement, and embark on two major military campaigns.
These measures were taken because after 9/11, everything became terrorism. Everything, as if we all now agreed that we could push aside all the other trouble in the world because we had finally found the Worst Thing Ever. I say this as a criticism, but I was not exempt from the emotions and the intellectual detours they produced in the moment. And I should have known better: I had spent most of my career studying long-standing problems of security and international relations. Even so, I was one of the millions of Americans and others who believed that the world after 9/11 had changed forever. We were wrong.
In the first days after the attack, the United States acted wisely. Rather than run off on some half-baked crusade—that part would come later—American leaders vowed to bring the terrorists to justice. George W. Bush, in a speech to Congress the week after the attacks, warned that every nation in the world “now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Some people were offended by that, but not me; I cheered the president’s commitment.
[Listen: Inside the White House on 9/11]
As much as I liked Bush’s statements, I was even more impressed by how little else the administration was saying about its plans. Silence can be ominous and intimidating, and I could see its impact on both friends and opponents when I went to the United Kingdom and Russia less than a month after 9/11. (I was researching a book on the Cold War that now seemed less important than current events.) In London, you could almost feel people holding their breath while waiting for the inevitable U.S. strikes in Afghanistan. “So is it tonight, then?” a cabbie asked me and my wife one evening, as if every American knew Bush’s timetable.
The reaction in Moscow was somewhat different. A Russian academic colleague greeted me with condolences, and said: “Now you know how we feel.” He meant the fear that Russians lived with after suffering attacks from Chechen terrorists for years before 9/11. As we strolled through Moscow, we watched uniformed street cops, clearly on heightened alert, as they stopped young men with dark skin (to Russians, an indication of origins in the Caucasus or Central Asia) and asked them for their papers and identification. Russian police are hardly charming even on a good day, and I winced at the obvious profiling. And yet, seeing the local Moscow fuzz push these guys around, I found myself making excuses for the police. I knew what Russia had been through, and I knew that Ground Zero back home was still smoking.
And, frankly, I was blinded by both patriotic pride and righteous anger. Here I was, an American in Russia, commiserating with our former enemies. (Vladimir Putin had been the first to call Bush with an offer to help, a cagey move from the Kremlin leader.) Maybe the world really was different now. Besides, we Americans were already engaging in similar heavy-handed tactics back home.
Still, I started to feel uneasy over the next several months about the strengthening consensus that the hijackers were geniuses and that al-Qaeda was now a significant threat to the entire West. After 9/11, I certainly didn’t doubt that terrorists could inflict massive damage—more than once, I felt nervous walking around Manhattan and London and Moscow in the 2000s—but too many nations, including my own, seemed to be losing all sense of perspective about the enemy.
I recall, for example, informally debating a well-known security scholar in the greenroom after we’d appeared on television together. I said: In the end, all that happened was that 20 men with box cutters hijacked some planes. You and I could have done this with a few classes of our graduate students.
He looked at me as if I’d said that the Green Berets or the 82nd Airborne were just a bunch of wimps.
The deeply flawed assumption that terrorists were 10 feet tall and that 9/11 represented a permanent change in planetary politics drove a frenzy that spread quickly throughout every level of the U.S. government. Not only did everything become terrorism, but every organization also became obsessed with its own role in anti-terrorism. If you worked in national defense and you still cared about nuclear proliferation, the security implications of climate change, Chinese expansionism, or even, say, pandemics—well, those were all worthy issues, of course, but what had you done to stop terrorists lately?
At the Naval War College (where I became the chair of the strategy and policy department shortly after 9/11), we felt this pressure when we started getting calls from Washington that bordered on the ridiculous. After years of ignoring education in regional studies and foreign languages, the Pentagon was now asking us if we could turn some of our students into Middle East experts practically overnight.
We were asked, for example, if we had courses in Arab and Islamic studies; no, we answered, not least because the Navy had always made it difficult to hire scholars who specialize in such things. Well, could the War College perhaps start teaching students Arabic—and maybe Farsi? Again, we reminded the Pentagon that we have the students for only 10 months, and we had no faculty, time, or language labs to do such a thing.
Something deeper, however, was happening in Washington and in other capitals around the world. The shock of 9/11 convinced Americans (and others) that three separate threats—rogue states, nuclear proliferation, and terrorism—were now all the same threat, a single existential danger that had to be eliminated by embarking on war rather than waiting to be struck. America would now reorder the world and stomp out rogue states before they could join forces with terrorists and hand them chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.
And that meant going to Iraq.
Operation Iraqi Freedom has been relitigated endlessly, and I don’t need to trudge around that track again. As I wrote on that war’s 20th anniversary, I supported the invasion of Iraq; I believed, for many reasons, that removing Saddam Hussein from power was a just cause. I now regret that support because of the way the war was executed.
The Bush administration did not discourage people from seeing a connection between 9/11 and Iraq, but the true link between them was that the occupation of Iraq sprang from the same belief that drove everything after 9/11: The old world was gone, and it was up to the United States and the other allied great powers to shape the new one. As then–U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair put it while defending the Iraq War in 2004: “This is not a time to err on the side of caution; not a time to weigh the risks to an infinite balance; not a time for the cynicism of the worldly wise who favor playing it long.” The idea that democracies could not be safe in a world of rogue states, terrorists, and unconstrained nuclear proliferation was not new, but 9/11 supercharged this fear, and pushed all other dangers into the shadows.
We are now living with the consequences of this panic and tunnel vision. The same threats that existed before 2001 remain with us, even though American leaders stopped paying attention to them for too long because of the inherently doomed attempt to reduce the threat of terrorism to zero.
First and foremost, we all still live with the only danger that qualifies as existential: nuclear war. (Nuclear terrorism might actually change the global order to the extent that we mistakenly thought 9/11 had, especially if multiple weapons were detonated in major cities. But even that horrible eventuality would not threaten America’s existence or the survival of humanity.) Nuclear weapons, and the means to deliver them, are now in the hands of one of the most dangerous regimes on Earth: North Korea. The United States, meanwhile, has trashed multiple agreements that made the world safer, including one that eliminated an entire class of nuclear arms. India and Pakistan have come perilously close to all-out conflict. Nuclear-armed Russia is perpetrating the largest war in Europe since World War II.
[Read: What happened to al-Qaeda?]
Another threat—one that makes global war more likely—is a direct outcome of 9/11. After the attacks in New York and Virginia, the United States led the way in legitimizing the notion that powerful states should simply squash any possible threats at will, by striking first, striking hard, and letting history sort it out later. (This is also called preventive war; it is an old idea, and rarely a good one.) When the Americans expanded the war against terrorists in Afghanistan to a war against a rogue regime in Iraq in 2003, they were arguing that some situations are simply too dangerous to tolerate, and that therefore states have the right to eradicate them before they ripen into an actual attack.
The Russians, predictably enough, have cynically adopted this concept with gusto as a rationalization for their wars against their neighbors over the past two decades. And now the Trump administration has used this dangerous excuse for its various military adventures around the world, including the war in Iran.
I grieve over one other aspect of the global War on Terror that is still with us. During the Cold War, Americans (mostly) managed to avoid becoming the thing we were fighting against. Western nations defeated the Soviet empire without losing their democracies. But after 9/11, rendition and torture—excuse me, “enhanced interrogations”—and other inhumane practices became policy. The legislature of a free nation granted its government massive, unaccountable powers in the Patriot Act. The horribly named Department of Homeland Security has metastasized into a gigantic boondoggle that weighs in on everything from floods in Vermont to the safe way to fry turkeys. Osama bin Laden has been dead for 15 years, but the damage to civil liberties and the budget to fund more terrible ideas remain.
Americans have for too long resisted the depressing fact that wars, dictatorships, terrorists, and other threats that existed before 2001 cannot be eradicated forever. Acknowledging that reality need not lead to pessimism. If the nuclear-armed nations refrain from destroying the planet—a big if—a strong and vibrant democratic America can survive, and even manage, these and other perils. During the Cold War, Americans learned that the innate strength of their political system and their faith in liberal democracy allowed them to live, and thrive, even in the face of an existentially dangerous enemy. Regaining that self-confidence, and renewing that faith in our principles, are the first steps toward undoing the panic that seized us after 9/11.
The post A Quarter Century of Panic appeared first on The Atlantic.
