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    walter-shapiro

    Walter Shapiro

    Columnist

    9/11, the Before and After: What Have We Learned?

    Posted:
    09/11/09
    Filed Under:Bush Administration, Iraq, Investigations, Terror, National Security, Afghanistan
    84 Comments  + 
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    Eight years later, I can still picture myself seated contentedly in the back seat of a New York taxicab listening to a morning drive-time radio DJ cheerily announce, "It's 10 of 8. If you're due at work at 8, you better get a move on."
    That will always be my last memory of The Before. The rest of this nameless depressing war-torn decade -- when we lost our innocence about terrorism and lost our hubris about Wall Street -- will always be The After.
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    After eight years -- more than the time between Pearl Harbor and the Berlin Blockade at the height of the Cold War -- you would think that we as a nation would have gained perspective. Instead, all we have achieved is chronological distance.

    We are still waiting for the great novel or epic movie that makes sense of our shared grief. A few months ago, Barack Obama was reading "Netherland" by the acclaimed Irish writer Joseph O'Neill, which is set in New York against the backdrop of 9/11. But "Netherland" is more about cricket, failed marriages and anomie than terrorism and fear. Don DeLillo's "Falling Man," published in 2007, directly confronts the psychological trauma of witnessing the collapse of the Twin Towers, but was (at least to me) emotionally and intellectually unsatisfying.

    In many ways, the most lasting piece of literature to emerge from the horrors of that day is the final report of the 9/11 Commission. While it tells in often novelistic detail the how of the attacks, the why understandably remains elusive. Yes, we know from the cockpit recorder that Ziad Jarrah, the hijacker who piloted United Flight 93, chanted, "Allah is the greatest!" before he was forced by brave passengers to crash the jet into a field in Shanksville, Pa. But is that enough to explain the worst day in American history since Dec. 7, 1941?

    With the benefit of hindsight, we can now glimpse the crazed excesses of the Great Fear that gripped America when Sept. 11 was immediately followed by the anthrax mailings. From the hoarding of Cipro to the frenzied speculation about "dirty bombs," it was stunning how fast national heartbreak morphed into collective panic.

    The direct result was the plug-ugly year of 2002, when America gave way to its worst impulses. This was when the Iraq War was concocted based on dubious premises about Saddam Hussein's purported weapons of mass destruction and sold to a fearful public with the help of hints of phantom links to al-Qaeda. In 2002, the CIA and the Bush administration embraced waterboarding and other forms of torture -- and Congress barely uttered a protest. Any hope that national tragedy would return honor to politics ended that year with the vicious -- and sadly successful -- attacks on the patriotism of Georgia Democratic Sen. Max Cleland. Cleland, who lost his legs during the Vietnam War, had supported initial Democratic objections to the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security.

    During the past eight years, America has grappled with the question of the cost of national security without ever answering it. For all the grumbling and fumbling by passengers, walking through an airport metal detector in stocking feet seems a small price to pay for safety in the air. But what of the Iraq War and the no-exit struggle in Afghanistan? It is sobering to realize that by the end of 2006 -- nearly three years ago -- more American soldiers had died in Iraq than New Yorkers had perished in the World Trade Center.

    These days, of course, Americans seem far more frightened by swine flu than a new outbreak of terrorism. That may be why Janet Napolitano, who heads the Department of Homeland Security (a totalitarian-sounding name for a Cabinet department in a democracy), warned of "complacency" in a Washington Post interview on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary. While there will probably remain a lingering risk of terrorism for years to come, it is also a remarkable triumph of national resilience that we have grown so sanguine about our safety.

    In the sad-eyed days after the 9/11 attacks, it became an instant cliché to announce that things would never be the same again. How naïve we were. Eight years later and we have not even successfully built a memorial on the ghost site of the World Trade Center. It can be argued -- and many would agree with this assessment -- that George W. Bush squandered a unique opportunity to forge an era of common purpose. But skeptics, myself included, question whether human nature is that malleable -- and whether a single heart-rending shock could change the habits of a lifetime. The Greatest Generation national unity that we lionize from the 1940s was forged by nearly four years of World War rather than the attack on Pearl Harbor alone.

    It is tempting to belittle the national need to relive those searing memories of the Twin Towers crumbling and the Pentagon burning each time the calendar hits a certain date. Writing in Slate, press critic Jack Shafer argued, "The anniversary story is, in almost all instances, a media scam designed to exploit audiences by reviving memories -- usually painful ones -- to sell newspapers or boost ratings."

    I have no need to wallow in the TV footage or even watch it. As a New Yorker, though, I might pause for a moment in silence as I pass my local firehouse. For I do believe that we have an obligation to remember all those who died on a sunny September morning eight years ago simply because they made the mistake of rushing to work.



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    Walter Shapiro

    Walter Shapiro, a PoliticsDaily.com columnist, has covered the last eight presidential campaigns as a columnist and political reporter... more

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