Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo
First responders salute as an American flag is unfurled at the Pentagon at sunrise to commemorate the 2001 terrorist attack on the Pentagon, during an observance ceremony, Monday morning, September 11, 2023, in Arlington, Virginia.
The anniversary of September 11, 2001, has become a ritual day to recall the horror of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and to remember the nearly 3,000 Americans who lost their lives in the first attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. But the reverberations are far worse.
September 11 rescued a faltering Bush presidency and turned the feckless Bush into a national unifying figure. His approval rating rose 35 points in three weeks. By late September, 86 percent of Americans approved of the way Bush was handling the presidency. It also made a thug named Rudy Giuliani, then mayor of New York, into a national hero.
In the wake of 9/11, Congress was rushed into passing an off-the-shelf wish list of assaults on civil liberty called the USA PATRIOT Act, which legalized a number of police-state practices that Congress had long resisted. Support for government also increased, leading some liberals to wishfully imagine that this unity might spill over into long-deferred bipartisan domestic reforms. Nope.
The attacks also liberated Dick Cheney, the de facto president for all matters related to supposed national security, to sponsor several foreign-policy disasters, whose damage persists and keeps compounding. The sources of the 9/11 attacks were the Taliban sanctuary for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, aided by Saudi nationals. But Bush was obsessed with Iraq, on the premise that Saddam Hussein has tried to kill his father.
So the attacks became the pretext for making war on Iraq, a misadventure with broad destabilizing effects on the Middle East for which we are still paying the price. Meanwhile, the American military involvement in Afghanistan lasted two full decades, with nothing to show for it but a humiliating final defeat. The U.S. is more indulgent of the corrupt Saudi dictatorship than ever.
If the real winner of the 2000 election, Al Gore, had been permitted to take office, there is a decent chance that the attacks of 9/11 would never have happened. Richard Clarke, then the government’s top counterterrorism official, had been warning the White House for several months that a terrorist attack led by al-Qaeda was imminent. But instead of connecting the dots and investigating why Saudi nationals were on U.S. soil taking pilot training, or creating a “do not fly” list, Bush officials kept blowing off Clarke and ordering him to find something on Iraq.
Contrary to the widespread fears immediately after 9/11, the new normal has not included repeated foreign terrorist attacks. But despite all the anti-terrorist measures, the danger is the huge increase in domestic terrorism, of which government has been far too indulgent.
On September 11, 2001, the Prospect had just moved its offices to Washington. In the course of less than a week, we published one of our best and most prescient issues ever, calling for a narrowly targeted response, warning against both military excesses and gratuitous attacks on our own liberties.
The issue was headlined “Defending an Open Society.” That was the challenge on September 12, 2001, and it still is.
