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The view from a quarter century later...
It's 8 o'clock on a Tuesday and I am just starting my shift. Ordinarily the TVs on display for sale would be playing a demo-loop fed from a DvD-player behind the counter but this morning they're tuned to CBS. A small crowd has gathered to watch as Tower 1 burns. I'm supposed to be answering questions, and trying to upsell people on the company's membership discount program and extended warranty plans but my heart's not in it. I watch the second plane hit live. I remember the collective gasp, and the horrified silence that followed. Then like Colonel Kurtz's diamond bullet it strikes me. This is no mistake. This is a deliberate act. An act of courage, an act of perfect crystalline Will.
100s of people dead in an instant because somebody made a choice. By the end of the day that count would be in the thousands. I would later find out that a friend of mine had lost an entire branch of their family tree in that fireball. An Aunt, an Uncle, two young cousins, and a dog all reduced to ash in the impact of United Flight 175 with Tower 2's southern face.
As the morning progresses there are rumors of other hijackings. Over a dozen planes are unaccounted for or not responding to ATC. There is rampant speculation about what target will be hit next. The President is in the air, and National Guard jets are being scrambled. The rest of my shift passes in a blur, but certain images remain seared into my brain.
Under my initial reaction of rage and helplessness something simultaneously imperceptible and momentous has shifted. It's cliche to say that 9/11 was the death of innocence for a generation but there is a truth to it. Things that had been mere abstract concepts to me when I woke up that morning, "Free Will", "Horror", "Heroism", "Good", "Evil", "Civilization", and "Civilization's Enemies", were suddenly real, immediate, and vital to me in a way that they hadn't been 24 hours previously. I can look back on my life today and say with confidence that, philosophically, the Charlie that woke up on the morning of September 12th 2001, was a fundamentally different person from the one who had gone to bed on September 10th.
In the interests of full disclosure I am tempted to turn this post into a rant about how politics and war are downstream of culture, and to wax philosophical about 9/11 as an act of theater, but I also feel like doing so would cheapen the moment, and be disrespectful to those who died 25 years ago today.
So instead I will ask, where were you on the day they wounded New York?
I was thirteen years old. I remember being at home, and my parents came up to me, with very serious expressions, and told me there had been a terrorist attack in America.
I was confused. I was not confused by the attack - I was confused by why they were telling me. A terrorist attack in another country? Aren't those very common? World Trade Centre? Never heard of it. Is three thousand a lot, relatively speaking?
After some more time had passed I did figure out why it was a big deal, but I remember that in the first moments, my reaction was to be surprised that people were acting as if it were a big deal. Mum and dad never told me about random news events in other countries before. My first reaction, therefore, was to get on with what I was interested in, without having any emotional reaction. It was the same kind of story, to me, as "many dead in earthquake in India", or "Russian separatists bomb city in the Caucasus", or "civil war breaks out in Latin America". I heard it, went "oh, okay", and that was it.
Over the coming weeks I did realise its importance. I remember thinking that the real crime of the hijackers wasn't killing such-and-such number of Americans, but rather making America afraid, and now America was going to make the entire rest of the world afraid in revenge.
Though I am a bit ashamed of teenage-me's initial response, I am proud that my teenage self then immediately opposed both the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, correctly calling that the invasions were unlikely to apprehend the people responsible for September 11, or to make the world safer from terrorism.
From where I stand, the invasion of Afghanistan was an almost unqualified success. We swept away al-Qaeda, swept away the Taliban, kept bin Ladin on the run, mended our wounded pride, and demonstrated to foreign leaders that they didn’t want to harbor terrorists that would attack the USA. It was the extended occupation that was the problem.
I don't think you can divorce the invasion from the occupation. Once the invasion happened, the occupation was inevitable and unavoidable.
I also do not consider 'mended our wounded pride' to be a valid objective for a military operation.
Why should anyone believe this? History (including American history) is filled with examples of successful punitive expeditions.
Something having happened at some point in all of history does not mean that thing was politically feasible for the United States in the early 2000s. Just bombing Afghanistan into rubble and leaving, even if that had been sufficient to achieve American strategic goals, is not something I think was ever realistically on the table.
If it was not politically feasible, then do you agree that not invading was also not politically feasible?
...and what exactly do you think would have happened if the US hadn't occupied Afghanistan? Do you think Congress was going to impeach Bush? Reagan managed to respond to the killing of 220 Marines and the near-sinking of a warship by Iranians without invading Iran or being impeached. I agree that after 9/11 Americans wanted revenge but I don't follow your idea that the Americans somehow lost the social technology to "blow stuff up and leave" during the Clinton era.
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The great lesson of the Trump administration is that something is only off the table until it isn't.
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