Thirteen years ago today, al-Qaeda terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, took out a chunk of the Pentagon, and very nearly crashed a fourth jetliner into a target assumed to be the Capitol or the White House. That attack, in the wake of the Bush administration's willful refusal to pay attention to increasingly urgent warnings from its own counter-terrorism officials, set in motion a series of events whose aftermath we are still living through.
Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush decided that the real culprit was Saddam Hussein, and made war on Iraq. ISIL is, in part, the creature of the regional destabilization and Islamist backlash that followed.
The Bush administration, at first an illegitimate and feeble presidency, found a new voice and a new purpose. Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld took over. In the USA PATRIOT Act, a long wish list of the most extreme warrantless surveillance techniques was rushed into law, and the U.S. became more of a garrison state.
Despite Bush's hostility to the public sector, airport security, which had been privatized, was turned over to a new public agency, the Transportation Security Administration. Americans, after September 11, 2001, were braced for a new normal of regular assaults on daily life, from mass germ-warfare attacks to more suicide hijackings. But except for a brief anthrax panic and a pathetic would-be shoe-bomber, none materialized. Domestic life returned to something close to normal, albeit with a much expanded force of secret police.
The Middle East, however, became even more of a cauldron. Now, more than a decade later, though Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are dead and al-Qaeda is much diminished, we have a new messianic threat that, if anything, is more medieval and more ruthless than the predecessor that spawned it. And we have a president who came to prominence as an opponent of the Iraq War, and who pledged to end U.S. military involvement in the region.
Obama proved to be a massive disappointment with his refusal to rein in the domestic police state fashioned in the Bush era. But he did succeed in ending American combat involvement in Iraq, and in beginning a pullout from Afghanistan. The assumption, however, that the region was stabilized proved wildly optimistic.
Much against his wishes, he is being pulled back into direct U.S. military engagement in the Middle East. In the course of a month, Obama has gone from saying, "We can't be the world's policeman" to something like: Nobody else can do the job.
But, where ISIL is concerned, what choice did he have?
For the moment, Obama is getting guarded praise from across the political mainstream for his address to the nation on his plan to contain and even destroy ISIL. As a political matter, he has temporarily jammed his Republican critics, because nobody has put forth a plausible alternative to his strategy, and his policy exposes divisions between interventionist and isolationist Republicans.
On the other end of the political spectrum, our friends in the progressive press have been oddly unconvincing when they argue for a more radical pullback of U.S. influence in the world.
It's one thing to point out that much of the mess in the Middle East is the legacy of western colonialism; and that in radical Islamism we are reaping the whirlwind from interventions ranging from the 1953 oil-lubricated coup against Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran to the U.S. support and then military overthrow of Saddam Hussein. It's another thing to offer serious advice on what the U.S. should do now.
Writing at the Huffington Post, the esteemed Jeffrey Sachs, who does such valuable work when it comes to alleviating poverty, argues, "Let the Middle East fight its own War on ISIS."
How, exactly, would that work? Sachs, whose criticism of past Western overreach is spot-on, doesn't say.
But while the calls for a drastic U.S. disengagement are unconvincing, Obama's own course is not entirely reassuring.
Realistically, who is in his new "coalition of the willing"? Do we really think that air power alone can stop ISIL? Are there really any "moderate" revolutionaries in Syria to work with? How do we avoid, inexorably, getting drawn in, deeper and deeper?
What is a reasonable way of involving and informing Congress without getting another blank check?
And what of the bizarre alliances we find ourselves entangled with-some that only stoke regional rage and turn ordinary Muslims into Islamists-from our tight link to the Saudi monarchy to our bond with Israel as it conducts itself in ways that in principle we don't condone?
John Kennedy described the Cold War as a "long twilight struggle." The Cold War raged for more than forty years. It periodically broke into hot wars, some of then needless and stupid like Vietnam, others of which, like Cuba, nearly set off World War III. In the end containment more or less worked.
But "containment" of ISIL is a trickier business. The Soviet Union of that era was less racially expansionist than ISIL, and less suicidal because it had a state to defend. Non-state terrorism was a bewildering foreign policy and military challenge in 2001, and even more so now.
Life was simpler when friendly dictators ran the Mideast. But as the region becomes less despotic and potentially more democratic, it also becomes vulnerable to new forms of expansive religious totalitarianism.
For now, there are key differences between September 11, 2001, and September 11, 2014. The first is that America is not under direct assault. The second is that we at least have a president who is reality-based, not prone to messianic interventionism, and who makes war only reluctantly.
But in the thirteen years since the first 9/11, the Middle East has become even more unstable. And the face of radical Islam has become more hydra-headed. To say that this reality is, in large part, the legacy of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush does not make today's policy choices any easier.
