Peter Trumbore: Observations/Research/Diversions

20 years of 9/11 is enough

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I am done with commemorations of 9/11. I have been done with them for a very long time.

I’m going to cut to the chase here. I have never felt an emotional response to the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Not on the day it happened. Nor on any of the increasingly fetishized, politically and emotionally manipulative annual commemorations that we inflict upon ourselves year after year.

For me these ritualized remembrances ring hollow. Our self-pitying refrain of “no one has suffered from terrorism the way we have” smacks of the most offensive kind of American exceptionalism. We claim from societies that have long suffered from terrorism the mantle of victim-in-chief. And I am tired of it.

I know this is a sentiment that is out of step with many. 9/11 and its commemoration does not resonate with me the way that it does for others. I have always, from the moment it happened, thought about it only in academic, analytical, terms. I can tell you exactly how I came to that point.

At 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, at the moment the first airliner hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center, I was sitting in my office at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., preparing to teach a class later that morning. There was an initial news report that suggested a small plane had accidentally crashed into the building, which I payed little attention to. I had no radio in my office, and when internet connectivity slowed markedly and then was lost altogether, I shrugged my shoulders and went about my work.

Then the phone rang. It was just after 10:30 a.m. and my wife, badly shaken and in tears, was calling to tell me that the towers had collapsed. And that I needed to get to a television.

I made my way to the student center, saw live images of the smoking heaps of rubble, learned that the South Tower had also been hit and fallen. And the Pentagon. And that a fourth plane had crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. And it was time to go to class.

My students were, of course, full of questions. Who could have done it? Why? Will there be more attacks? Having spent a fair portion of my time in graduate school studying terrorism, I had answers.

I asked my students to consider the meaning of the target selections, symbolic representations of American economic, military, and political power. I asked them to consider the methodology of the attacks, sophisticated, well-planned, and coordinated suicide operations. Given the combination of meaning and methodology on display, I told them that the most likely perpetrators were al Qaeda, the only organization I knew of that had demonstrated the necessary capability coupled with the determination to attack American interests. Follow-on attacks, I thought, were highly likely.

We took a moment or two to refocus and gather our thoughts, and then I taught my scheduled lesson on international economic development.

By the time I got home that night, my initial speculation had been confirmed, and that, thankfully, no secondary attacks had occurred. I also found that my wife was deeply, deeply affected. Because, unlike me, she watched everything, live, as it happened. She saw the second plane hit the South Tower. She watched people leaping to their deaths to escape the intense flames. She watched lines of cops and firefighters filing into the buildings in an effort to find and evacuate survivors. And she watched those towers collapse, obliterating their lives.

I saw none of it in real time. What I saw was how the attacks had succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the plotters. I saw how the golden ring that every terrorist organization reaches for, unlimited attention to themselves and their cause, was delivered by the wall-to-wall media coverage the attacks generated. Every network. Every channel. MTV. Home Shopping. ESPN. Video of the planes hitting and the towers collapsing on an endless loop. Talking heads naming al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and explaining to their audience why they would have the United States in their crosshairs. For days, and days, and days after.

This is my frame of reference for 9/11. This is how I talk about it with my students, who today are too young to have any memory of the day but who have grown up with its consequences. And what consequences.

The stoking of existential fear of terrorism by what scholar John Mueller has called “the terrorism industry” — security and defense contractors, media conglomerates, think tanks and research centers, pols and policymakers — which profits from that fear and leverages it to advance policy objectives the American public would otherwise never countenance. Like the creation of a surveillance state and erosion of our civil liberties at home. Like the abandonment of our core values and the embrace of torture and indefinite imprisonment of “enemy combatants” held without charge or trial. Like an open-ended authorization for two decades of American presidents to wage war anywhere on earth so long as they can draw a line, no matter how tenuous, to the events of 9/11 and those who carried out the attacks.

But wait, there’s more. Because 9/11 also unleashed suspicion and fear of our fellow Americans simply because of their Muslim faith. And with that fear and suspicion came discrimination, hate, and violence. That fear and suspicion led us to turn our backs on immigrants and refugees from majority Muslim countries. For many Americans, the words “Muslim” and “terrorist” became synonymous. Because of 9/11.

The celebrated unity of the first few days after 9/11 quickly gave way to division as the attacks were politicized and leveraged for partisan advantage by cynical and ambitious parties and politicians. To question the policy responses to 9/11, or to decry the discrimination and hatred directed against our Muslim neighbors, was to be unpatriotic, to undermine America, to side with and give comfort to our enemies.

We are not unique. Other countries have suffered far more from terrorism than we have. We have ignored, and continue to ignore the reality that 9/11 was the exception not the rule about terrorism in America. The rule about terrorism in America is 160 years of Americans turning their guns and bombs against fellow Americans in the name of causes deeply embedded in American culture, society, and politics.

Sept. 11, 2001 bestowed upon us no special virtue, no privileged claim of unique victimization that should have empowered us to lead a global war on terror which adversaries like China seized upon to justify genocidal campaigns against their own Muslim minorities.

And yet, in our arrogance, we did claim those things. And we did, and continue to do, all these things. And every September, on the 11th day of the month, we wrap ourselves in flags and ritually remind ourselves of our own pain and suffering while refusing to confront the consequences of our response.

That’s why I’m done with 9/11 commemoration.

Remote learning: The final lessons

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(Credit: Department of Homeland Security)

It’s been five weeks since this impromptu exercise in online teaching about terrorism began, and now we’ve come to the end. So what I’ve asked my students to think about for this final week of class are two simple questions:

  • Why hasn’t there been another 9/11-scale terrorist attack in the United States in the nearly 20 years since?
  • What are the real risks that terrorism poses to the United States, and how should we address them?

One of the ways I get at that first question is by having my students read a piece by journalist Timothy Noah, published back in 2009, in which he lays out a series of possible explanations for why another 9/11 had not yet occurred. Despite being a decade old now, many of the theories he lays out have held up well, others not so much.

As I discuss in this first video below, Noah’s explanations range from the comforting to the decidedly worrisome. On the comforting side, Noah essentially argues that 9/11 was a fluke that won’t be repeated. Rather than succeeding out of strategic brilliance and flawless tactical execution, the 9/11 attacks worked because of dumb luck. At every one of the many points where the plot could have been discovered or something could have gone wrong, the breaks went in favor of the terrorists. The likelihood of that happening again, he argues, is pretty darn low. On the worrisome side of the equation is the simple argument that another large-scale attack is ultimately inevitable, and it is simply of matter of time until it happens.

Should another large-scale terrorist attack happen in the US, many analysts believe that it will likely involve the use of weapons of mass destruction, or CBRN (chemical-biological-radiological-nuclear) terrorism. Journalist Steven Brill makes this point in assessing US terrorism security policy post-9/11. In the video below I summarize the case made by leading terrorism scholar Bruce Hoffman on CBRN. He touches on three main points: Why we haven’t seen CBRN terrorism yet; why it might now be plausible; and why we shouldn’t dismiss the threat.

In the final video, I introduce a contrarian argument, courtesy of Ohio State political scientist John Mueller, who argues that the risks of terrorism for the United States have been wildly overblown (see a short review of his book by that name here), that our overreaction to the risks is more damaging and dangerous than the threat of terrorism itself, and that rational policy making must be based on a clear-eyed assessment of what terrorists actually can do rather than our “worst case fantasies” about what they might want to do.

For Jeb, W’s legacy is no liability

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george_and_jeb

Last month, just after the second Republican presidential debate, I wrote about Jeb Bush’s curious (to me) doubling down on his claim that his brother, President George W. Bush, had “kept us safe” from terrorism during his presidency.This was in response to goading from Donald Trump, who had the nerve in the debate to remind the viewers that it was Bush who was in the White House on 9/11.

Trump has been using this inconvenient fact to bludgeon Jeb ever since, forcing Bush to hold the line with the tenacity of a terrier. But it’s more than that now. As Peter Beinart writes at The Atlantic this morning, “It’s now clear: Jeb Bush wants to speak about his brother’s record on 9/11 as much as possible.”

And so Jeb continues to defend his brother:

In the latest episode of the reality show that is Donald Trump’s campaign, he has blamed my brother for the 9/11 terrorist attacks on our nation. That Trump echoes the attacks of Michael Moore and the fringe Left against my brother is yet another example of his dangerous views on national-security issues. … Let’s be clear: Donald Trump simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
The historical record begs to differ. Bob Woodward, stenographer to official Washington, writes in Plan of Attack, the first volume in his Bush at War trilogy:

It was not an exaggeration when Bush dictated to his daily diary that night that, “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.” In some respects the attacks were more devastating. Instead of 1941 Hawaii, which was not then a state, the targets were the power centers of the homeland. Instead of Japan, the attacks were conduced by a shadowy enemy that had no country or visible army. Worse for Bush, CIA Director Tenet had explicitly warned him about the immediacy and seriousness of the bin Laden threat. Focusing on domestic issues and a giant tax cut, Bush had largely ignored the terrorism problem. “I didn’t feel that sense of urgency,” the president acknowledged later in an interview. “My blood was not nearly as boiling.”

But for Jeb, the real responsibility for 9/11 lies elsewhere, with Bill Clinton, W’s predecessor in the White House. In an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Monday, Jeb said:

I think there’s two ways to look at Islamic terrorism. One is a threat that has to be taken out as it relates to, you know, creating a strategy that calls it a war, or we view it as a law enforcement operation where people have rights. I think the Clinton administration made a mistake of thinking bin Laden had to be viewed from a law enforcement perspective.

Back to the historical record.

Richard Clarke was appointed by Bill Clinton as the first National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism, and he continued to serve in that position under George W. Bush until he resigned in March 2003. The country’s top counterterrorism official, Clarke ran the Situation Room on 9/11. In his book, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, Clarke writes:

Clinton left office with bin Laden alive, but having authorized actions to eliminate him and to step up the attacks on al Qaeda. … He had seen earlier than anyone that terrorism would be the major new threat facing America, and therefore had greatly increased funding for counterterrorism and initiated homeland protection programs.

When Clinton left office many people, including the incoming Bush administration leadership, thought that he and his administration were overly obsessed with al Qaeda. After all, al Qaeda had killed only a few Americans, nothing like the hundreds of Marines who died at the hands of Beirut terrorists during the Reagan administration or the hundreds of Americans who were killed by Libya on Pan Am 103 during the first Bush’s administration. Those two acts had not provoked U.S. military retaliation. Why was Clinton so worked up about al Qaeda and why did he talk to President-elect Bush about it and have Sandy Berger raise it with his successor as National Security Advisor, Condi Rice? In January 2001, the new administration really thought Clinton’s recommendation that eliminating al Qaeda be one of their highest priorities, well, rather odd, like so many of the Clinton Administration’s actions, from their perspective.

So why does Jeb continue to toe the line? Well, it’s simple. The Bush name, and W’s legacy, isn’t the liability you’d think it is. Especially for Republican voters. A YouGov survey taken in September tells the tale.

In that poll, George W. Bush enjoys a 79% job approval rating among Republicans. When asked how good a job W did in “keeping the U.S. safe while president,” a whopping 81% of Republicans said his performance was good or excellent. Let that sink in for a minute.

Finally, when asked, “If Jeb Bush were elected president, do you think he would do a better or a worse job than George W. Bush?” 43% of Republicans said they thought Jeb would do just as well or better.

That’s the bottom line. Jeb has realized that his brother’s legacy is no liability, at least the voters who will decide the GOP’s nominating contest.

Jeb doubles down

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bush 9-11
George W. Bush, keeping America safe.

 

It was one of those moments during last night’s GOP debate when I had to stop and ask: Did he really say that? OK, fine, there were a lot of those kinds of moments, but this one was … special.

In response to Donald Trump’s goading criticism of his brother’s administration, Jeb Bush responded with this:

You know what? As it relates to my brother, there is one thing I know for sure, he kept us safe. I don’t know if you remember, Donald. You remember the rubble? You remember the firefighter with his arms around him?

Yeah, I remember. That would be the rubble of the World Trade Centers.  That would be the rubble of the World Trade Centers that were destroyed by terrorists in hijacked airliners on 9/11. That would be Sept. 11, 2001. When George W. Bush was president.

screen_shot_20150917_at_2.39.53_pm.png.CROP.original-original.39.53_pmSo, according to Jeb, George kept us safe from terrorism by presiding over the country on the day it suffered the single worst terrorist attack in its history.

Now we have to acknowledge that Jeb was going off-script in this moment of the debate, and while he’s had some nine months now to prepare any number of effective responses to criticisms of his brother’s (or his dad’s) presidencies, every time he gets one of these he stumbles and fumbles his way into some awkward statement or other.

You’d think that in the clear light of the next day, Jeb would find a way to walk that bit of gross misstatement of the historical record back. Maybe emphasize that W kept us safe after 9/11, or something. But nope. Today he doubled down, sending out the tweet above.

Maybe there’s some signal of steely resolve that Jeb is trying to send here, I don’t know.

What I do know is that the families of some 3,000 Americans who lost their lives that day, and the families and friends of the thousands more service men and women who gave their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan in the Bush years that followed, might beg to differ.

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