Bin Laden’s Bequest

It came as a shock. The image of a plane disappearing into a building as flames erupt. Then another. Sirens. Morning TV shows superseded by first confused then speechless newscasters. A plane strikes the Pentagon. Tiny specks—people—fall a thousand feet to their deaths. A collapsing skyscraper. Then another. A great column of smoke. Thousands dead.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush was reading to second-graders at an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida. The kids were almost all black, as was their teacher, Kay Daniels. It was meant to be a feel-good photo op, a manifestation of his administration’s commitment to “compassionate conservatism.” A few minutes after 9 a.m., chief of staff Andrew Card quietly walked over to interrupt. There’s a picture of him whispering in the president’s ear: “A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.”

The look on George W. Bush’s face at that moment is one of serious concentration, the kind necessary when new and dramatic facts present themselves, facts that are hard to digest because they foretell so many changes that it’s difficult to know how to think about what comes next. In that reaction, Bush was altogether attuned to reality. He grasped that he was not the master of events.

It was not as though nothing could be done. That evening, Bush addressed the nation with strong and stirring words. Under his leadership, within weeks, and with full support from Democrats in Congress, the use of military force was authorized, the Patriot Act was passed, and the Transportation Security Administration was established. The Department of Homeland Security was instituted one year later. But what was done has had many unintended consequences. 

Andrew Card was right. Osama bin Laden orchestrated an attack. And the response of the Bush administration was sensible. It’s absurd to imagine that Al Gore, Bush’s adversary in the 2000 election, would have taken a less muscular, less aggressive path. But once one embarks on a war, whether a war on terror or a war on poverty, a great deal is set in motion, and those in command are rarely able to get things to stop when they wish.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, it’s evident that America’s multi-phase military response gravely undermined U.S. global supremacy. In 1991, in the lead-up to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the first Bush administration’s decisive defeat of Saddam Hussein’s forces burnished the American image of military invincibility, and the image was not tarnished by the messy business of military occupation. 

The Clinton administration exercised restraint throughout the 1990s, even in the face of provocations such as the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the bombing of the USS Cole. The effect was paradoxical. On the one hand, the lack of forceful response may have encouraged bin Laden and others, as many argued after 9/11. But responses are always dangerous, and the measured approach of the Clinton administration avoided any direct exposure of the limits of American power, and thus sustained the unipolar, American-dominated character of the post–Cold War system.

Perhaps the illusion of unlimited power would become evident one way or another in the twenty-first century. In the course of actual events, however, that illusion was shattered by our military response to 9/11: the grinding Middle Eastern wars of the 2000s, which bled well into the 2010s and are now rekindled. America’s adversaries learned an important lesson: If one can avoid losing decisively, one eventually wins—and the American elites are not able to inflict decisive losses, in part because they are not masters of a global system (or even of their allies), and in part because the American people will not tolerate the costs. 

9/11 gave us more than the indignity of disrobing in TSA lines. The domestic war on terror inaugurated today’s surveillance state. Jacob Siegel has documented the repurposing of laws passed and institutions established after 9/11 to serve as instruments of domestic control before and during the pandemic.

The responses to 9/11, at home and abroad, marked the beginning of rampant deficit spending, which was required to finance wars and programs that the American people did not want to pay for. 9/11 also created powerful reasons for our governing class to ignore America’s domestic problems in the early decades of the twenty-first century. With bipartisan support, the Clinton administration had erected the legal infrastructure for economic globalization in the 1990s. Working-class Americans began to feel the negative consequences in the 2000s. But elite attention fell elsewhere. The same can be said for the damaging consequences of mass migration and demographic change, which were gathering speed in the 2000s. In many important respects, by evoking the responses that it did, 9/11 contributed to the rise of populism.

I have no love for Osama bin Laden, whose terrorist scheme killed three college friends in the Twin Towers. But I look back after a quarter-century, my grief softened, my anger tempered, my patriotic passions cooled, and I regard him with a degree of reluctant respect that one grudgingly accords to a bold adversary. He had great ambition: to topple the Leviathan. He failed, but not without consequence. The Leviathan was roused, and like any great and powerful beast enraged, it broke many things and made a mess.

I do not blame the men who led America after 9/11. I imagine that I would have made similar decisions, had I been burdened with their responsibilities. So, on this anniversary, let us mourn those who died—and refrain from litigating our national responses. Our task is to think clearly about what the last twenty-five years have bequeathed us and do our best with what we have been given.