Can US escape the shadow cast by the 9/11 terror attacks?
As the twin towers of the World Trade Center once overshadowed lower Manhattan in New York City, their destruction by suicide bombers on Sept. 11, 2001, has cast a long shadow over two decades of U.S. national security policy.
The 1990s were a time of heady optimism about the international world.
After outlasting the Soviet Union, the United States claimed victory in the Cold War. By trouncing Iraq in the Gulf War of 1991, President George H.W. Bush shook off the “Vietnam Syndrome” and forecast the emergence of a New World Order in which “the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle.”
The conservative scholar Francis Fukuyama declared the decisive triumph of Western liberal democracy over competing international political ideologies.
While the 1990s provided episodic foreign policy challenges, none seemed to tarnish the optimism that pervaded Americans’ thinking about the world and their place in it. The United States was at its zenith.
The 21st century dawned bright and sunny – as did the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, in New York and Washington.
Like a bolt from the blue, however, the terrorist attacks of that day seared the nation’s largest city and its capital and thundered across the Pennsylvania landscape.
Americans who experienced 9/11 will never forget their feelings of shock, fear and disbelief as they watched the Pentagon burn and the twin towers collapse, with those massive plumes of toxic smoke billowing skyward.
The 9/11 attacks significantly reoriented domestic security policy. The determination to prevent another such assault – reinforced by the anthrax scare of late 2001 — convinced the American people to accept significant limits on their freedom.
The Patriot Act, many provisions of which endure to this day, authorized enhanced domestic surveillance and law enforcement techniques previously deemed inconsistent with civil liberties. The law also enabled local police departments to secure and deploy military weapons and equipment, which eroded the traditional culture of community policing.
Congress established the Department of Homeland
Security to spearhead counter-terrorism efforts across the federal government, and the Transportation Security Administration to bolster airport security.
Fear and revenge motivated President George W. Bush to order the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Those actions were designed to remove the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that had given sanctuary to the 9/11 terrorists, while punishing Saddam Hussein of Iraq for deeds past and predicted to come, the next time with weapons of mass destruction.
Both invasions initially succeeded, as the targeted regimes collapsed quickly under the onslaught of massive U.S. and Allied military might.
When the United States tried to build democracies in the resulting vacuums of power, however, it was faced with daunting political challenges, as well as determined adversaries who violently contested its goals.
The result was prolonged guerrilla warfare that cost trillions of dollars and claimed the lives of thousands of U.S. and Allied soldiers, along with hundreds of thousands of Muslims.
Two decades after 9/11, the situation in Iraq remains fraught at best, while the Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan signals the largest U.S. foreign policy failure since the Vietnam War. The United States, seemingly the invincible “hyper-power” following the collapse of the Soviet Union, has been relegated to a lesser status, beset by strategic competitors abroad and division at home.
Ironically, Osama bin Laden’s goals in attacking the United States in the first place have come to fruition.
Stunned by the news from Kabul, the American people must now reconsider their role in the international system and the appropriate uses of the nation’s vast power. Debates will continue between those who believe that U.S. power is essential to maintain the international order and those who would avoid challenges abroad.
As for the war on terror, its days are numbered. Does the scourge of terrorism always demand a military response? Or by seeing it as a crime rather than as war, might we devise a better strategy that combines prevention, surveillance, investigation, policing, community organization and economic development? However these debates turn out, the shadow cast by the 9/11 attacks will grow longer over the decades to come.
Peter L. Hahn is a professor of history at Ohio State University and the author of six books on U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East.