After 9/11, we thought we would come together. But today, we know better.
After 9/11, we thought we would come together. But today, we know better.
T his is the short view. I was on a very progressive campus on 9/11, and with hindsight, I’m grateful for it.
I came back to my dorm room that morning intending to skip the first session of an intensive French class and take a nap. But as I arrived there, my phone was ringing. My mother asked if I was watching the news and said that a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers. The other plane hit while we were on the phone. She was confused, unable to quite process the idea of a second plane hitting the other tower. I was confused, too, and said I would call her later, and I sought out the one common room on the North Campus where there was a TV. A handful of other students were watching the news. Others wandered in and out on their way to showers, sometimes not registering the gravity of what was happening until their second time through the room.
Without modern smartphones, there wasn’t even the illusion of being anything other than a passive spectator. If it had happened today, we all would have been gathering information, and rumor, as it dispersed through social media, checking in constantly with friends or family, zeroing in on the accounts closest to the action. But that morning, we were spectators for what will surely go down as the most consequential live broadcast in television history.
We were just a 90-minute drive away from the city, and by the afternoon, a student blood drive was already underway to help the victims and first responders. Classes were officially canceled for the rest of the day, and a panel of professors and administrators would be assembled that night to discuss the attacks. Among other students, there was already some growing anger that New York’s peculiar wound and grief was already being subsumed into a story of national anger.
By midmorning, hazy reports were coming in about fires in certain government buildings in Washington, D.C., which turned out not to be true. I announced to the room, “We’re being attacked.” This was more my attempt to get a conversation started because just watching without speaking to each other was unbearable. After the first tower fell, one of the other students began weeping and shaking. Her sister was supposed to be at Stuyvesant High School that morning, three blocks away from the disaster, and she was terrified for her. I remember watching more broadcast news nearby in the Student Center and sidling up to a professor of Islam whom I admired. On the screen there was footage of rockets being fired in Afghanistan. “Is that us?” I asked, partly hoping it was, but also dreading the same answer given the absence of the president. “If it is, it is utter madness, insanity,” he said. How could we know? He speculated it was probably another armed group in Afghanistan. Indeed, it was the Northern Alliance.
A large panel of professors assembled in the 380-seat hall at the Olin Humanities Building. Bard College was a very progressive campus — all the woke stuff was there in embryo. At the time, there was still an Alger Hiss Chair of Social Science, held by an eco-Marxist. But we weren’t treated that day to harangues about American foreign policy or the chickens coming home to roost. The professors were high-minded, and civilized. The school president, Leon Botstein, struck solemn notes of outrage, mourning, and horror. The one presentation that stuck out to me that night as the most radical and left-wing was by a media professor who warned us about how the hours, weeks, and months ahead would feature the manipulation of our genuine emotions for other projects. I thought this was wildly premature and borderline inappropriate. I was wrong. It was prophetic, wise, and necessary. He included warnings about the collapse of free speech to come.
We got almost a tiny preview of it ourselves moments later. A student I knew to be in one of the more seriously left-wing circles on campus finally did broach the subject of America’s foreign policy. More or less he asked when it would be appropriate to discuss it as a subject, while implying heavily that our government in some way provoked responses like this attack. Did we not support radicals like these across the Islamic world, in the Cold War? A sizable portion of the student body hissed at this question. At Bard!
Again, I thought the question was somehow tin-eared. I thought something like, “Read the room, buddy.” September 11th wasn’t about anything else yet. And in that moment, I thought it shouldn’t be. It was still the pain of the bereaved. It was still rage, incomprehension, and vows of revenge. And yes, all this was rapidly — that very night — turning into a palpable sense among the leading political class of the United States that the playtime of the 1990s, with its stupid controversies about sex and real estate, was over. America was attacked. America was good, and the attackers were evil. We were going to be a serious country again, with a serious purpose. Had you not noticed the flags waving throughout the town? We like each other more now, I thought.
But I didn’t hiss. Because censoriousness of this kind is a warning sign of danger to me. And on reflection, my regret 20 years after 9/11 is that I didn’t listen enough to the radicals, at least on some points. I’ll come back to that.
The search for the longer view, to understand September 11th and its aftermath, began soon afterward. I remember how quickly embarrassed I felt about the anti-war Left. They were led by some sectarian communist grouplet, Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, which was a cutout of the Workers World Party, a sectarian grouplet of the communists who didn’t split when the Red Army stomped into Hungary in 1956. This was hardly anti-interventionism; it was just the usual hodgepodge of iconoclastic egalitarianism.
At first I looked for the long view in a larger conflict between Islam and the West. I had been reading Hilaire Belloc’s writings on the great heresies of the Christian faith. He counted Islam among the heresies. He and G. K. Chesterton both had preserved a Crusader’s imagination into the Late Victorian Age, and Belloc warned that Islam would rise to challenge Christendom once again.
I searched in theology and history for answers about whether Islam was compatible with liberalism, as scholars such as Fazlur Rahman hoped and promoted. Or was there something in the life of Mohammad and in the conception of the dar al-harb that made the borders of Islamic civilization particularly bloody — whether that border is between Pakistan and India, or running through the heart of Ethiopia. Here I ran aground, because to my mind the great gushers of blood in the 20th century led me to Prussia and Moscow, or Mao’s China, not to Islam.
Books like Roger Scruton’s The West and the Rest tried to get at the fundamental difference between Western and Islamic civilization. He tried to locate it not in faith in Christ, but in the Western endeavor to share territory and law together — in an idea of shared settlement that is somehow more flexible and forgiving than dar al-Islam. The theological controversies of Islam which, owing to the primarily juridical, rather than theological, character of that faith, tend to ripple out immediately into great and violent political controversy. Or so it was suggested.
But Scruton’s English laxism is a modern confection, too. The English Civil War demonstrated that apocalyptic violence is just as possible when the debates are about infant baptism, or the Calvinist doctrines of grace and the sacraments. Scruton’s West is the product of 1688 at the earliest, or perhaps the end of the last penal laws in the 19th century.
Still, I searched in religion. Perhaps Wahhabi Islam — and its terror — was really a theological crisis within Islam. If God had granted the prophet swift, stunning military victories in the first decades and centuries of Islam, taking this faith to Spain and shaking the gates of Vienna itself, flowering out into a rich and culturally sophisticated medieval civilization, then what explained the West repelling this march of Islam? What explained the modern West’s riches and power, which are broadcast into the Islamic world day and night? Perhaps this is a providential humiliation sent by God to Muslims that they have somehow apostatized from the fighting faith of the first three centuries.
Looking back, it is also obvious that many of the political and intellectual figures who promoted a “West vs. the Rest” framing of the war on terror cherished in themselves the secret hope that a fundamentally religious conflict would revivify Christianity. They looked to demographers and social analysts who were suggesting that the increasing presence of Islam in the West tended to heighten people’s identification and engagement with the Church.
But maybe the clash of civilization was too large. Maybe one could understand that 9/11 had something to do with our foreign policy. The veteran and small-r republican thinker Andrew Bacevich would preach an understanding of our engagement in the Middle East that began on July 3, 1979, when President Jimmy Carter signed off on a plan to provide “non-lethal” support to Afghan insurgents, in the hopes of embroiling the Soviet Union in a Vietnam-like quagmire, one that would keep the Soviets busy and out of the rest of the Persian Gulf.
Carter would announce a new doctrine of U.S. foreign policy, which was protecting the flow of oil out of the Gulf:
The region which is now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two-thirds of the world’s exportable oil. The Soviet effort to dominate Afghanistan has brought Soviet military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the Straits of Hormuz, a waterway through which most of the world’s oil must flow. The Soviet Union is now attempting to consolidate a strategic position, therefore, that poses a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil.
Bacevich commented that this strategy was in some ways more invasive than the Truman Doctrine on which it was modeled. “Ensuring that Americans and America’s allies would not want for oil required that the United States impose order on the Persian Gulf and its environs,” Bacevich wrote in America’s War for the Greater Middle East. “At the time few said so out loud, but implementing the Carter Doctrine implied the conversion of the Persian Gulf into an informal American protectorate. Defending the region meant policing it.”
But this deeper engagement with the Middle East after the overthrow of the Shah of Iran was taken without serious reflection. “That the United States was willy-nilly supplanting the British as the dominant power in the Arab world and more broadly in the Greater Middle East ought to have given Americans pause. After all, the lessons to be taken from the British experience were almost entirely cautionary ones,” Bacevich would write.
This involvement made us party to every political contest in the Middle East. It made us continuing sponsors of regimes that we, in our hearts, loathed — like Saudi Arabia. It made us sustain opportunistic friendships with authoritarian losers like Hosni Mubarak. It made us party to regimes against which the terrorists declared a holy war, mobilizing some of the deepest passions of fanatics and malcontents.
PHOTO GALLERY: 9/11 Attacks
After 9/11 the reaction, even on the American political right, was to in part agree with the terrorists who had just struck at us. Islamists and crusaders for democracy converged on the idea that these despotisms were fueling discontent. We needed a policy in the Middle East that discouraged radicalism and gave the people themselves legitimate constitutional expression for their aspirations. From the right, the first attempt was to transform a “global war on terror” into a democratic domino theory. Faster, please.
Then came elections in Iraq, which brought to power a cat’s-paw of Iran. Elections in the Palestinian territories brought Hamas. Again, it turned out to be a convergence of interest between Islamists and democratists. And yet the same dead-end delusion, that elections could salve the radicalism of the Middle East, motivated Barack Obama’s sponsorship of the Arab Spring.
The results have rolled in. Egypt fell for a time to the Muslim Brotherhood. Libya and Syria became sources of incredible chaos and disorder that ultimately destabilized the European Union itself, breathing life into once-moribund European populism and giving playgrounds to ISIS. Terror following upon mass movements of refugees contributed to Brexit and to the election of Donald Trump. The U.S. and its allies were overwhelmed by the adverse results of their utopian ambitions. Now Turkey, more than ever, has Europe at the throat. The chaos allowed the small but significant reentry of Russia into Middle Arab politics, precisely what the Carter Doctrine was meant to prevent.
But still, not even our foreign policy can quite explain 9/11. It has been fashionable in some quarters to argue that Osama bin Laden succeeded on 9/11. But we know that he did not believe this. We know that he thought America would be swiftly defeated in Afghanistan, and the resulting crisis of confidence imposed on our country by his holy warriors would destroy us in the same way the Soviet Union was dissolved after 1989. We know that he apologized to others in his terrorist group and in the Taliban for putting them into such an awful position for years. He only later tried to make the long war in Afghanistan fit his theological and political theories and ambitions.
No, our international involvement does not adequately explain 9/11, because political acts and moral acts don’t work like physics where for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Human action can have a legible political rationale and yet be pure evil. Our post-9/11 attitude in which pundits grandiloquently proclaimed an End to Evil has been lampooned and lamented, and even the people who launched it have largely repented of their utopian ambitions. But they were right on one point: What we saw on 9/11 was evil.
What followed was hubristic and foolish. It is impossible, this year, to think of 9/11 apart from the disaster in Afghanistan. Our involvement there ends with the Taliban taking over Kabul, a city that the United States not only rebuilt, but built out into a much larger and more valuable settlement than it had ever been previously. It ends with the U.S. government complaining pathetically that that the new emirate led by the Taliban doesn’t have enough women in government. We leave Afghanistan doing exactly the thing we failed to do before 9/11. We are failing to sufficiently screen the people to whom our government gives out visas.
What is left over from this project? The enormous and invasive security state in our midst. We used to have objections to the federal government having access to our library cards. But now our National Security Agency has a legal and institutional cloak under which it can spy on every key press at the end of our fingers, every purchase we make, every location we visit. We have the humiliations of taking off our belts and shoes at the airports. It is this radical expansion of the government’s spying, done mostly through the behemoth resources and reach of giant Silicon Valley corporations, that I should have preoccupied myself with opposing, if I had had the sense to pay more attention in that Bard College panel 20 years ago.
Fittingly, this spy culture coexists with a culture of impunity among our leaders that leads them to treat us with contempt. The head of the CIA, John Brennan, used his agency to spy on the Senate while it conducted oversight of his agency. A serious country would not just fire and disgrace a man after such a betrayal; it would convict him of the most heinous crimes and impost the most terrifying punishment on him. Instead, he became a quasi-celebrity who spent years accusing half of the American electorate of being subversives under the control of Moscow. This from a man who was once a boyish communist himself.
Everything is dashed. Twenty years from 9/11, we are not a more serious country and have no serious purpose in the world. The ideological challenge of radical Islamism has not inspired new life in the Christian churches of the West; they continue to decay. Even liberal democracy has suffered. Not just from the reputational blows abroad, but from a more fundamental lack of confidence at home. Progressives see conservative democratic victories in Europe or at home as signs of defection from democracy. The most searching and important conservative thinkers have come to see in liberal democracy some of the same ideological dreams and passions of communism. History cannot be over, so if liberal democracy is in some way “the end of history,” then it must be a delusion. But we cannot imagine anything preferable.
Then again, there is a much simpler reason there should be a crisis of liberal democracy right now. Our universities have capitulated to gibberish. Our political institutions are being robbed and exploited for private purposes. And the advent and ubiquity of social media has made each member of our society who cares to notice intimately familiar with the true thoughts and prejudices of the members of his nation. We are more fearful now — and in a more serious crisis now — than we were in the days after 9/11.
Back then we still believed we had the internal resources to meet our challenges. We were, and this is the guiltiest thing of all, almost thankful for the challenge of barbarism against our civilization. After 9/11, we thought we would come together, that this challenge would bring us to a new shared common understanding of our civilizational inheritance and appreciation of each other despite our differences. But today, we know better. We hate each other, and so we doubt that our living together in this way is good anymore. In 20 years, the American people have welcomed the Taliban back into power, armed al-Qaeda in several countries, debased our institutions, and turned on each other as the real enemies, the true Taliban.
We need a longer view, because from the vantage point of 20 years, all that proceeded from that dark day is a tragedy beyond words, a comedy so black, it makes you sick.
PHOTO GALLERY: 9/11 Attacks