The road we didn't take: Twenty years on from 9/11.
How might the world have been remade if the U.S. response to the September 11 attacks had been different?
Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. American media will undoubtedly be (and already is) filled with commemorations of that terrible event. While I haven’t checked, I would imagine that on Saturday there will be a measure of silence in lower Manhattan and perhaps a display of lights. President Biden and others will undoubtedly speak. Flowers will be laid on the graves of thousands of servicemen and women who perished in the wars that followed the disaster. Then we’ll move on with our lives. It’s not that we will “forget”; if nothing else we’ve seen far too many bumper stickers, magnetic ribbons on the backs of cars and online memes that seemed quite concerned that we might. Who could forget it? But it probably is worth a reappraisal of 9/11, not merely to put it in its proper historical context—which we largely have failed to do—but also to imagine how things might have been different had we chosen a different path to respond to it.
The immediate conditions that gave rise to the September 11 attacks are gone now. Osama bin Laden is dead and his terrorist consortium Al-Qaeda, though still active in some parts of the world, is not the threat it was in the 1990s and early 2000s. The attacks certainly did shake the U.S. out of its 1990s complacency and it made Americans understand how precarious our position of power astride the world generally is. But many of the underlying causes of the attacks remain or have even gotten worse. Economic instability, in the form of global income inequality, has grown much worse. So too has the threat of climate change. Nations and associations of have-nots, with deep grievances against wealthy first world superpowers like the United States, continue to stoke their resentments, as bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda did. The Israeli-Palestinian issue has certainly not been solved and is arguably worse now than it was in 2001. Nine-eleven did not happen because “they hate our freedoms.” Osama bin Laden didn’t give a hoot in Hell about our freedoms. It was a geopolitical move, as was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that, in many ways, it resembled. We haven’t addressed those geopolitical factors in any sustained way.
As we all know too well now, George W. Bush was not the optimum person to have been President at the time bin Laden’s planes struck the towers and the Pentagon. Gripped by a terminal shallowness that made him incapable of seeing the world as it was, and surrounded by craven advisers willing to use the crisis to advance various short-sighted ideological goals, Bush II badly botched the at least arguably rational response to 9/11, that being the war against Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Then he doubled down on failure by taking his and much of the world’s attention off the target by attacking Iraq in 2003. Few people are around today who would still argue going into Iraq was a good idea. Bush’s presidency foundered on this rock. By enabling ISIL/Daesh, the Iraq War made the situation in the Middle East far worse than it had been before 2003. And all of this was after Bush told the American people that personal or economic sacrifice wasn’t necessary in the wake of 9/11. “Go shopping,” he told us, as if that would help.
Imagine instead what could have been. Bush could have seized the wartime moment, and the short-lived season of partisan political unity, to not only undo Al-Qaeda, but to address the root causes of 9/11 as well as other fault lines of instability in the world. Bush might have reasoned that the best way to eliminate the power of Islamist extremists like Al-Qaeda was to render them, and the countries from which they draw support, economically and politically irrelevant. The United States was deeply involved in the Middle East, after all, mainly for strategic reasons tied to securing access to petroleum. If he could have obviated the need for oil, at least from foreign sources, he could have reduced the American footprint in the Middle East and improved its economic position. Furthermore, he could have sold it as a wartime measure: using energy independence as a way to deal a crippling economic blow to a wide range of U.S. enemies, including Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia (nominally allied with the U.S., but a hotbed of anti-American sentiment. Bin Laden was Saudi). He could have essentially weaponized energy independence.
Thus, imagine if Bush had said to America’s economic leaders, “We are now at war. I want you to put a plan on my desk for total independence for the United States from all foreign sources of energy within five years.” Such a crash energy program would have been vastly expensive, on the scale of American mobilization for World War II. But Bush could have rammed such a program through a pliant Congress with bipartisan support. Such a plan would have greatly jump-started renewable energy programs in the U.S. and begun a quick phase-out of fossil fuels—thus turning the corner on climate action. Oil execs who dared to question the plan could be extorted into compliance by the threat of being shown up as unpatriotic, “against the troops” or sympathetic to terrorists. Bush, a former oil man himself, would’ve been the perfect enforcer—even better than Al Gore, had the Supreme Court anointed him, rather than Bush, as the winner of the 2000 election. Indeed, I have little confidence that Gore would have had the chutzpah to attempt such a plan. He lacked the zeal for world-historical, guided-by-faith messianism that plagued Bush’s fragile psyche.
As for the military response to 9/11, Bush could have employed it to redesign American power in the world. If he had said to military leaders, “The war we’re fighting is much different now. It’s against non-state actors like Al-Qaeda. This is not a war where vast armies with fleets of technological weapons will make the difference. Put a plan on my desk to restructure the armed services top-to-bottom to focus on interdiction, counterterrorism and surgical precision. We don’t need any more damn aircraft carriers.” If Bush had decided that the U.S. military should look much more like the Delta Force than the vast bureaucratic and technological boondoggle that his father unleashed in Kuwait, not only might Bush II have been able to terminate bin Laden, but he would have been the architect of a leaner, meaner, nimbler, more flexible and much less expensive military machine far better suited to 21st-century warfare. The vast fiscal savings could have been poured back into the economic and climate change restructuring programs.
If he had been more judicious and creative in retaliating militarily against Afghanistan, Bush could also have avoided the very trap that bin Laden engineered the 9/11 attacks to be: a provocation to enmesh the United States in a costly and exhausting war in South Asia. If Bush had hunted bin Laden seriously and relentlessly with pinpoint Delta-style strike teams constantly dropping in and out of bin Laden’s likely hangouts, without engaging large numbers of troops on the ground, he probably would have capped off the terrorist chieftain within a year or two at most, after which he could legitimately have declared “Mission Accomplished” and served up bin Laden’s head as a trophy to the American people. U.S. forces would not have had to take ownership of Afghanistan’s anti-Taliban government. We certainly wouldn’t have had 20 grinding years of war ending in defeat, as we did last month.
Imagine, also, if Bush had worked seriously to harness public outrage and political solidarity after 9/11. Instead of telling us to “go shopping,” he might have said, “This war will require sacrifices. We have to drive less, use less energy, eat better, and take better care of our money and our resources.” He could have raised staggering amounts of capital for energy independence and military reform programs through the sale of war bonds, as FDR’s government did during World War II. Again, anyone who whined too loud could have been bullied back into compliance by being accused of being “unpatriotic” or not “supporting the troops.” Partisanship would have been blunted, as it was during World War II. Bush could have ridden a wave of bipartisan, compassionate collective sacrifice among Americans to a virtual coronation as a wartime leader in 2004.
But none of this happened. In 1992, when he was running for President, Bill Clinton mocked Bush’s father as having lacked “the vision thing.” Like father, like son: Bush II was utterly bereft of it too. His responses to 9/11 were molded on essentially late Cold War machinery, reflecting the Cold War-era geopolitical biases of his chief advisers, Condoleeza Rice and Dick Cheney. He thought in terms of armies, nation-states and traditional victories, rather than strike teams, non-state actors and systemic reforms. And he failed to seize the best opportunity in a generation for lasting innovation and change.
Bush just couldn’t do it. He wasn’t up to it, intellectually or morally. And it’s not as easy as blaming the Supreme Court, because Gore, being a politician down to his genetic code, wasn’t up to it either. He couldn’t have done it. He understood the climate change threat, but he was far more a politician than he was a bold transformative leader. He lacked “the vision thing” too. We, the American people, failed to respond to 9/11 in an appropriate manner. We let the opportunity slip by us. We are at fault.
So that’s where we are now, 20 years down the road. Bush, now disgraced and humiliated, is long since retired, painting pictures of his feet in the bathtub. Osama bin Laden sleeps with the fishes, but it took a decade and an entirely new President to finally drop him. Afghanistan is again controlled by the Taliban. The vials of wrath in the Islamic world against us remain as full as they were in 2001, maybe even more so. And climate change continues its relentless assault. But we’ll have some moments of silence on Saturday and probably some pretty lights and inspirational speeches. I wish we had come out of the disaster of 9/11 with more than that.
The photo of the Gore campaign rally may have originated with NBC news. All other images are public domain.
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