In a heartbeat, a world changed
Security checks everywhere. Islamophobia. Freedom and openness diminished. Two decades after the Sept. 11 attack, it feels like Americans today may be living in more fear than ever before
WASHINGTON—You probably have a story. Virtually everyone who was alive and old enough to form memories has a story. I have a story: my sister called me — my wife-to-be and I were still in bed, as we worked in bars then — and said, “Turn on your TV. Something is happening in New York.”
We turned it on that morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and saw one of the two World Trade Center towers in flames, having been struck by a plane. We assumed it was a horrible accident. Most everyone did: in those last moments of something like innocence, the president of the United States went ahead with plans to read a book to a classroom of schoolchildren.
Then, a second plane hit the second tower.
No accident. Terror.
And in that moment, and the hours that followed as the two towers fell and Lower Manhattan was engulfed in smoke and dust, and as the Pentagon was struck, and another plane went down in Pennsylvania, you could feel the wedge of history cleaving the before from the after.
There is nothing at all remarkable about my own experience of that day, except that there’s a good chance it is something like yours, or your brother’s or your neighbour’s. Clifford Chanin, the vicepresident of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, remembers that he got into his car to drive from his home in Brooklyn to an appointment in Manhattan after the first plane struck, and after being turned back at the closed bridge when the second plane hit, “I went home, and just watched it on TV, basically, like anybody else, anywhere else.”
Everyone has a story about that day on which, watching TV, it seemed everything had changed. Two decades later, it’s clear how much did change, especially in the U.S.: the mundane routines of everyday life, the organization of the U.S. government, the course of wars and international affairs.
Twenty years. Two decades. It feels like the blink of an eye, and at the same time like an entire lifetime. For some people — including 75 million children born in the U.S. after September 2001 — it has been literally a lifetime. Yet for many, it still feels like the wounds are fresh. A woman taking in a baseball game in New Jersey while gazing across the Hudson River at the One World Trade Center tower last weekend told me she’s been thinking a lot about that day recently, the recent withdrawal from Afghanistan having resurrected old feelings about family members who served there after the attacks.
“It still feels raw. It still hurts.”
So much changed after that day — in the U.S., and how it looks at itself and at the world, and how the world looks at it — that it is nearly impossible to catalogue all of it.
So, many of us start with the most personal, mundane differences. Like airport security. Gather ’round children and hear about how you used to be able to run up to a gate five minutes before your plane was scheduled to take off and board a jet. There were metal detectors, but you didn’t have to take off your shoes or belt; the shampoo in your carry-on was fine; your nail clippers went unexamined.
Everyone notes the airports because they are obvious — this was an attack launched with hijacked planes — but the hyper-securitization extends well beyond there. If you try to enter a government building in the U.S., or a tourist attraction like a Smithsonian Museum, the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty ferry, you’ll be confronted with a now-familiar security gauntlet. Once upon a time, children, you could just stroll right into these places.
And once upon a time, public spaces in general were not marked with bollards and fences and concrete blockades and obstructive planter boxes meant to fend off car attacks. Once upon a time, you could sit down in a train station (which you cannot do in the fancy new New York City train terminal), rent a locker there or find a garbage can, and even leave your bags in a heap on the floor for a moment while lined up for coffee.
Maybe each of these mundane changes seems like a little thing, on its own. But each is a sign of a society that has closed itself off bit by bit, trading in increments a little more freedom for a little more security, coming to view every interaction of life through the lens of a potential terrorist attack, and every person — particularly those whose skin tone might lead some to suspect they are Muslim — as a potential terrorist.
The profound change in the approach to customs and immigration was a part of an entire reorganization of the American government around the previously obscure concept of “Homeland Security” — a combination of intelligence, law enforcement, emergency response, customs and immigration, transportation and a host of other responsibilities meant primarily to provide security against terrorists.
The shift in priorities was fundamental and far-reaching. Earlier this year when Lindsay Rodman, a former Obama administration security official, tried to explain during a panel discussion some of the differences between the U.S. and Canada, she said that while Canada’s government views nearly everything through a lens of international trade, the U.S. government looks at every issue now through the lens of security.
The changes this new outlook has led to are far too many to list in this space. Local police forces have been militarized, as has immigration enforcement and the customs and border patrol department. The emphasis on terrorism in a department also responsible for responding to natural disasters has resulted in the neglect of the latter in a time when climate change is making weather emergencies more common. Domestic espionage of U.S. citizens became more widespread. Civil liberties long held to be core to U.S. identity were sacrificed to fear.
And then there is foreign policy. Sept. 11, 2001 led directly to two long, expensive, painful wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Neither could be called a success. Both have left U.S. citizens wary of getting involved in foreign “forever wars.”
In that sense, it feels to some of us like things have come full circle. I grew up in a world in which the U.S. disaster in Vietnam
had led to a foreign policy consensus in which the U.S. and its allies were reluctant to launch preventative, nationbuilding conflicts with vaguelydefined goals. Desert Storm and Kosovo represented a new kind of war: limited in their scope, short, with very specific objectives. Campaigning for the job of president in 2000, George W. Bush decried attempts at “nation building.”
“I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into a country and say: ‘We do it this way, so should you,’” Bush said in a 2000 debate against Al Gore.
All of that changed when Bush launched a “War on Terror” after the attacks in 2001.
Many in the U.S., and Canada and elsewhere in the world, were fully on board with the concept of fighting terrorists overseas rather than waiting to fight them at home. If attacks on skyscrapers in North American cities leaving thousands of civilians dead is what nonintervention looked like, it was time to intervene. Under three successive presidents, these wars metastasized from a hunt for terrorists and weapons of mass destruction into a mission to create or preserve stable democracies abroad. They were justified, along the way, by (real) concerns about the treatment of women and minorities, and the state of freedom and democracy in those places. Exactly the kind of wars Bush had decried as ineffective.
In Afghanistan, 20 years, $2 trillion and tens of thousands of lost lives later, the Taliban was back in charge before the U.S. even officially withdrew. The place looks no more stable and no more democratic than it did before the U.S. invaded. Iraq remains an unstable hotbed of regional terrorism.
It is hard to see, for many, what was ultimately accomplished.
The disastrous and painful U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has made the old wounds raw again. But Biden’s articulated new foreign policy against “forever wars” — one in which, again, the U.S. has sworn off trying to police the world with its military and spread democracy with the barrel of a gun in favour of considering only direct U.S. interests — is one that the majority of the American public now supports. It is also one that aligns, as Biden policy very rarely does, with Trump’s position.
The wars launched to fight terror are over. Terror was not defeated.
In the days after the Sept. 11 attack, Bush urged the public to “go shopping with their families” so as not to allow the terrorists to achieve their objective of seeing Americans live in fear. On the buying stuff front — and the economic rebuilding that shopping represented — the U.S. response to the attacks was a phenomenal success. American GDP had rebounded by the end of 2001. Lower Manhattan was rebuilt in less than a decade and, before COVID, had become a more thriving commercial and residential neighbourhood than it had been before the attack. A housing and financial market crash and a pandemic had a far larger effect on two decades of U.S. economic history than terrorism did.
And yet it is hard to say that Americans have not been living in fear since those attacks. This has become a more suspicious, more closed off, more locked down country in the two decades since everything changed. It is there in how the U.S. government views the world, and there in how it treats its own citizens. It is there in every visit to a museum or airport. It is there in the minds of Americans, flowing from their own memories of that day.
Two decades later, there has not been another major foreign terrorist attack on U.S. soil. But the fear of another terrorist attack has transformed the government and society, dayto-day life, the expectations of freedom Americans carry with them. A societywide pride in freedom and openness gave way to a societywide attempt to ensure security.
Everyone has a story about that moment on Sept. 11, 2001, when mourning over an apparent tragic accident gave way to fear and anger over an obvious attack. In a day — a few moments — everything seemed to change. And in retrospect, most everything did.
“I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into a country and say: ‘We do it this way, so should you.’ ” GEORGE W. BUSH IN A 2000 U.S. PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE AGAINST AL GORE