David Swanson/AP Photo
A side gunner on a Chinook 47 looks out over Helmand province, Afghanistan, on a return flight to Kandahar Air Base, February 21, 2003.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, The American Prospect gave cautious support to striking back against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, while warning about the risks of a wider war and emphasizing the need to preserve our own civil liberties at home. We opposed the Iraq War but insisted there were circumstances when the use of American power was justifiable. On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, we devoted an issue to the “lost decade”—the squandered opportunity after 9/11 to use the ensuing surge of solidarity and patriotism to deal with the real challenges the nation faced (and still faces). Not all the articles that appeared in the Prospect reflect a single viewpoint; the Prospect has also served as a platform for debate. Here are some excerpts from a few of the many articles we published over the past 20 years:
From Our Post-9/11 Issue: “Defending an Open Society”
(October 22, 2001)
The Persistence of Politics
By Robert Kuttner
“There is a terrible risk that we will overreach or underreach; that we will target the wrong enemy and inflame hundreds of millions of ordinary Muslims without wiping out terrorists … If ever there were a moment to engage and debate complexities, it is this one.”
The War We Should Fight
By Paul Starr
Andres Leighton/AP Photo
A Guantanamo detainee is escorted to interrogation, February 27, 2002.
“We are embarked upon a war that has no clear limits and may require deep engagement in a region of the world that is strange and hostile to us. Our involvement there could backfire. The war might spread to neighboring countries. To avert these risks, we ought to keep the grander visions of the conflict in check. We must not compound the tragedy of September 11 by undertaking a jihad of our own.”
Life and Liberty
By Harold Meyerson
“Today, proportionality is both a moral and a strategic concern. As we learned in Vietnam, you don’t win a war in which public sentiment is crucial by destroying a village—or a nation, or a region—in order to save it.”
Excusing Terror
By Michael Walzer
“[Terrorism] aims at a general vulnerability. Kill these people in order to terrify those. A relatively small number of dead victims makes for a very large number of living and frightened hostages. This is the ramifying evil of terrorism: not just the killing of innocent people but also the intrusion of fear into everyday life, the violation of private purposes, the insecurity of public spaces, the endless coerciveness of precaution … But when moral justification is ruled out, the way is opened for ideological apology. In parts of the European and American left, there has long existed a political culture of excuses.”
Terror and Liberalism
By Paul Berman
The present conflict seems to me to be following the twentieth-century pattern exactly, with one variation: the antiliberal side right now, instead of Communist, Nazi, Catholic, or Fascist, happens to be radical Arab nationalist and Islamic fundamentalist … The genuine solution to these attacks can come about in only one way, which is by following the same course we pursued against the Fascist Axis and the Stalinists. The Arab radical and Islamist movements have to be, in some fashion or other, crushed. Or else they have to be tamed into something civilized and acceptable, the way that some of the old Stalinist parties have agreed to shrink into normal political organizations of a democratic sort.”
One Year Later: On the Eve of the Iraq War
A Reckless Rush to War
By Robert Kuttner, Harold Meyerson, and Paul Starr
(September 30, 2002)
J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
President Bush declares the end of major combat in Iraq, May 1, 2003.
“As Congress debates war with Iraq and the new Bush doctrine, it must look beyond November and beyond Baghdad and ask if the direction the administration wants to take America in actually will bring us the security Bush promises. The administration’s unilateral determination to overthrow Hussein is already taking us down a dangerous path. Overthrowing the system of international law and security that has worked for the past half-century is more dangerous still.”
2005 to 2010
The Liberal Uses of Power
By Paul Starr, Robert Kuttner, and Michael Tomasky
(February 21, 2005)
“In reaction against Bush’s embrace of Wilsonian rhetoric, some liberals may be tempted to go to the opposite extreme, downplaying any democratic aims of American foreign policy and asserting only the goals of peace and stability. That is not our view. In charting an alternative to Bush’s foreign policy, liberals should uphold liberal aims. But those aims are not well served by a policy that has discarded the framework of international law and institutions built up since World War II and has made American power appear illegitimate in the eyes even of traditional allies … President Bush has been wrong, often calamitously so, about many things, but he is right that America must do all it can to prevent another 9-11. When facing a substantial, immediate, and provable threat, the United States has both the right and the obligation to strike preemptively and, if need be, unilaterally against terrorists or states that support them … The liberal alternative to Bush is not to lessen our power but to listen to the world and, in the process, to add to the power that we and other liberal democracies can marshal to strengthen our security and freedom and to get on with the forgotten agenda of protecting the global environment and alleviating the poverty and misery that are still the fate of hundreds of millions of the world’s people.”
The Incompetence Dodge
By Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias
(October 23, 2005)
“Most liberal hawks are willing to admit only that they made a mistake in trusting the president and his team to administer the invasion and occupation competently … The incompetence critique is, in short, a dodge—a way for liberal hawks to acknowledge the obviously grim reality of the war without rethinking any of the premises that led them to support it in the first place … An honest reckoning with this war’s failure does not threaten the future of liberal interventionism. Instead, it is liberal interventionism’s only hope.”
The Cult of Counterinsurgency
By Tara McKelvey
(October 23, 2008)
“A quiet revolution in the U.S. military has resurrected Vietnam-era strategies to fight the war on terrorism. Retired Lt. Col. John Nagl makes counterinsurgency seem so appealing that it’s easy to forget its dark side.”
A Feminist Case for War?
By Michelle Goldberg
(October 27, 2009)
“One of the few remaining rationales for maintaining the occupation is protecting Afghan women. Is that enough? … The answer depends on whether one believes that the American military can be a force for humanitarianism. After the last eight years, that’s a hard faith to sustain. Staying in Afghanistan seems indefensible. The trouble is, so does leaving.”
The War Over the War on Terror
By Adam Serwer
(June 3, 2010)
“The [Obama] administration’s studious avoidance of associating terrorism with Islam isn’t political correctness run amok. It represents one of the few points of divergence between the Obama administration and its predecessor on matters of national security—a deliberate effort to narrow the scope of the ‘war on terror’ to a fight against al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups.”
On the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11: “The Lost Decade”
(September 2011)
The Remains of the Day
By The Editors
“Ten years after the attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon, the United States is in bad shape, but our problems have little to do with what al-Qaeda did to us. America’s troubles stem from what the country has done to itself—or rather, from what our political leaders have done with the nation’s power and resources … The patriotism that swept America after September 11 could have helped forge a genuine moment of national unity and common purpose. Instead, the Bush administration and other Republicans used it as an opportunity to vilify liberals who opposed the push for war in Iraq or the need for wider government surveillance … The American public is ready for a rapid drawdown of troops [in Afghanistan] and ambitious nation-building at home. In a larger sense, bin Laden’s death can provide closure to the 9/11 decade. We never should have lost a decade—and we must not lose the next one—because of 9/11.”
Solidarity Squandered
By Rick Perlstein
“We had heard Bush when he declared, ‘We are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them.’ It turned out, however, that this was not the fight the Bushies were spoiling for.”
The Global Patriot Act
By Kim Scheppele
“From the end of World War II to the start of the ‘global war on terror,’ international law provided crucial support for the promotion of human rights around the world. But the response to the September 11 attacks has had a profound and little-appreciated impact on international law with devastating global consequences for human rights, democracy, and constitutionalism.”
Brennan Linsley/AP Photo
Air Force personnel drape an American flag over the remains of a U.S. soldier killed in an IED attack in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, July 29, 2010.
2012 to 2021
The Beginning of the End in Afghanistan
By Jamelle Bouie
(May 2, 2012)
“If anything, the beginning of the end in Afghanistan will help Obama build his ‘leadership’ case against Mitt Romney.”
Endless 9/11s: How the Bush-Cheney Response to the World Trade Center Attack Shaped Today’s Terrors
By Robert Kuttner
(September 11, 2014)
“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.”
How Biden Can Close Guantanamo Once and for All
By Karen J. Greenberg
(November 30, 2020)
“Shuttering Guantanamo, long overdue, offers the chance to bring closure to the 9/11 era.”
The Whitewashing of the Afghan War
By Emran Feroz
(July 14, 2021)
“What started as a counterterrorism operation led to wholesale cooperation with and empowerment of rapacious warlords, corrupt politicians, and drug barons.”
Lawful Carnage
By Rozina Ali
(August 10, 2021)
“The Afghanistan War may be ending, but the age of war drones on. We may not be barreling cities with bombs anymore, but inflicting law and order at home and around the world, it turns out, still results in physical and moral carnage.”
