Marty Lederhandler/AP Photo
For the two decades since the September 11 attacks, the Prospect has covered the war on terrorism and its discontents. We invited writers and editors from the magazine to reflect on the meaning of the moment.
Harold Meyerson
In the summer of 2001, the Prospect began its move from Boston, where its office had been located for the past decade, to Washington, D.C. Already, two young staff writers and our development director had gone to work in our temporary D.C. digs. I moved from Los Angeles in late June to assume the executive editor’s position, and three of our four new writing fellows reported for work during the first week in September, shortly after we occupied our new offices at 2000 L Street Northwest.
By the time I got into the office on the morning of 9/11, the Pentagon had just been attacked and—memory fails me—either one or both of the Twin Towers had collapsed. In short order, our building, which was five blocks north and four blocks west of the White House, had been ordered to evacuate, along with nearly every other building in downtown D.C.
At that moment, I wanted to keep the staff together. We had no idea if there were more attacks to come; I wanted us to come up with stories we could post ASAP on our website; I didn’t want our 22-year-olds who’d been in the city for all of one week to go home on their own just yet. (On foot: the subways had stopped running.) The question was, what building near the office that was still open could we go to that had a television where we could follow the news?
We ended up going to the bar in the nearest large hotel: the Ritz-Carlton, which, on any other day, our young writers wouldn’t even consider patronizing as they couldn’t afford to buy a beer. On that day, I did buy some beers as we watched the horror stories. And unbeknownst to us, upstairs in the hotel, a story of transnational money and power was unfolding. Turns out that the board of the Carlyle Group, that venerable private equity firm, was meeting in some penthouse suite, and had diverted from its scheduled agenda to deal with a more immediate problem: how to get one big-time Saudi investor in the firm, who was attending the meeting—and who turned out to be one of Osama bin Laden’s many brothers—spirited out of the country and back to his Arabian home. With the assistance of some other attendees—a group that included former president George H.W. Bush and his former secretary of state James Baker—this particular bin Laden, along with other bin Laden relatives who had money in Carlyle, managed to flee the country in utmost secrecy. Down in the bar, we missed this story, of course, the details of which didn’t become known for many months.
We’ve had a skeptical view of private equity ever since. (Actually, we had it well before 9/11, but the Carlyle/bin Laden alliance was emblematic of the kind of power relationships we’ve worked to expose and critique.)
As I was walking home once we’d left the Ritz-Carlton, a single plane flew overhead. For the first and only time in my life, I saw everyone on an urban American sidewalk look apprehensively skyward, wondering if it was “one of ours.” Soon, millions of people in distant lands would be looking apprehensively skyward, too, as the Bush administration made pointless, disastrous war on Afghanistan and Iraq.
Harold Meyerson is editor at large at The American Prospect.
Sasha Polakow-Suransky
TAP Fellow, 2001–2002
I spent the morning of September 11, 2001, blissfully unaware of the attacks unfolding in New York and Washington. Then, suddenly and without explanation, the Detroit-bound plane I was on started descending and landed in Toronto. I later learned our flight was the last U.S.-bound plane over the Atlantic that was not forced back. The plan had been to catch a connecting flight to D.C. and start my job at TAP the next day. I didn’t get to Washington until the 15th—in a rental car.
For several hours, we sat on board surrounded by rumors circulating from the few passengers with working cellphones: Propeller planes had crashed into the Empire State Building; the World Trade Center had been bombed; terrorists had stormed the Pentagon. Heavily armed Canadian police in SWAT gear lined the jetway as passengers were patted down one by one and allowed into the airport. In the terminal, I found a local phone book and managed to book a hotel room while watching the towers collapse over and over on TV. The cab driver filled me in on what had happened. Canadian trains were still running and I managed to make it to the border in Windsor the next morning, where my mother had somehow managed to cross and after a few hours of waiting in a traffic jam drove us back to Michigan.
The debate at TAP was heated about the first post-9/11 issue, with younger staffers’ calls for more analysis of what had generated the anti-American wrath that led to 9/11 largely dismissed as bad optics or apologetics. Fareed Zakaria wrote such a piece for Newsweek a few weeks after the attacks, but most of the first post-9/11 TAP issue was dominated by a resolute denunciation of terrorism. In those weeks, the American left was still in loyal-opposition mode.
Already, there were fears of what the response to the attacks would mean for civil liberties, American Muslims, and U.S. foreign policy and the military-industrial complex, but it was only in subsequent issues of the magazine that those were properly taken up as TAP returned to its strengths and began calling out the Bush administration’s instrumentalization of a tragedy to roll back civil liberties, restrict immigration, and launch a series of unwinnable wars.
Sasha Polakow-Suransky is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy.
From the Archive:
“The Invisible Victims: Undocumented Workers at the World Trade Center” (December 2001)
“Flying While Brown” (December 2001)
Matt Duss
TAP Writer, 2007–2014
At the end of the Coen brothers’ 2008 Washington satire Burn After Reading, two senior U.S. intelligence officials, having effectively insulated themselves from the story’s confusing and violent consequences, struggle to articulate what they’ve learned. “I guess we learned not to do it again,” one concludes.
Much of Washington’s reaction to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan—in which our wise people took a brief break from prepping the next great catastrophe, conflict with China, to try and dump 20 years of shared bipartisan failure into President Biden’s lap—served notice that they have not managed to learn even that.
A full accounting of the enormous human, strategic, financial, and political costs of our post-9/11 war on terror (which, despite the Afghanistan chapter having been closed, is still very much ongoing) is not possible here, but suffice to say: It didn’t have to be this way.
More importantly: It still doesn’t. Americans can choose, if we want it, a foreign policy that promotes human dignity and global solidarity instead of sustaining inequality and exporting insecurity. We can choose to compete in providing vaccines and green technologies instead of weapons and debt. We can choose to welcome more refugees instead of creating them. We can choose to fight global corruption instead of running the world’s largest laundromat for it. We can choose to aggressively confront our foreign-policy community’s unaccountable profiteering and relentless militarism, even when, especially when, it comes cloaked in disingenuous concern for the peoples whom it will, in the end, only further immiserate.
We should choose that.
Matt Duss is foreign-policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
From the Archive:
“It’s the Game That’s Wack” (February 2008)
“The Isolationists Are Coming!” (May 2013)
Sam Rosenfeld
Web Writer, 2004–2006; Online Editor, 2006–2007
I started working at the Prospect in 2004, several years into the country’s disastrously outsized and omnidirectional military response to the September 11 attacks. By then, in the world of intra-liberal discourse, the bloom was already coming off the rose when it came to high-minded calls to engage in a battle of ideas with Islamists and to utilize American power abroad for humanitarian ends. In the face of a deepening quagmire in Iraq and a shambolic occupation of Afghanistan, such arguments—replete with paeans to Orwell and the tough-minded virtues of Cold War liberalism—seemed even more like retreats to abstraction and intellectual cosplay. As the situation soured, one notable move by liberal hawks of various stripes was to intensify their criticism of the Bush administration and its stewardship of America’s post-9/11 response. On Iraq in particular, many argued either implicitly or explicitly that the failures of the endeavor were ones of execution more than strategy. As Matt Yglesias and I would argue in an essay in 2005 we called “The Incompetence Dodge,” such an emphasis on technocratic management amounted to an evasion of rather than a reckoning with the folly of warmaking-as-humanism.
Notwithstanding the assumption that 9/11 would “change everything,” the center of American politics soon enough shifted elsewhere, just as public opinion eventually turned against the wisdom of these military engagements. That made it all the more dizzying when, during the belated conclusion of the American occupation of Afghanistan after 20 deadly and scandalously fruitless years, all the old platitudes about American power and all the old arguments about competence and execution made an instant and noisy comeback in criticisms of the withdrawal. It was enough to make me feel young again.
Sam Rosenfeld is associate professor of political science at Colgate University, specializing in party politics and American political development.
