It was an incredibly bright and clear East Coast morning on September 11, 2001. I’ve always been an early riser, so even as a college student, I was awake and at breakfast when I heard a plane had hit the World Trade Center.
As for the rest of that morning, I don’t totally trust my own memory. But I do want to emphasize that quite a lot of us did literally watch thousands of people die on live television as the towers collapsed. And those who didn’t see it live saw it replayed endlessly in the hours and days that followed.
I don’t think anyone who didn’t experience 9/11 as an adult can fully understand how confusing that day was.
First it was one plane, then it was two. The first plane could’ve been an accident, but a second clearly wasn’t. The Pentagon was hit, but there were also false alarms about fires at the State Department and on the National Mall. The Capitol building was hastily evacuated. It was widely suspected early on that al-Qaeda was responsible, but of course nobody knew that for sure. So we were watching, and it was horrible.
And for all we knew, more buildings were about to blow up. A few weeks later, there was an anthrax scare at M.I.T. and an anonymous threat at the Harvard campus libraries. Researchers find that there was a pronounced increase in vacancy rates at the three most iconic office buildings in Chicago because people feared other landmark buildings would be attacked. It was a crazy, panicky time.
A few days after the attack, George W. Bush went to an Islamic center to reassure the country that Islam is a religion of peace and to try to tamp down on an incipient wave of hate crimes, many of which were mistakenly directed at Sikhs.
But while Bush displayed statesmanship and steady leadership on this front, his administration also moved the country helter-skelter into a war in Afghanistan that failed in its main objectives and into a war in Iraq that had nothing to do with the attack.
Critics are often reluctant to admit it now, but these were overwhelmingly popular moves at the time. Invading Iraq had 70 percent approval in March and April of 2003. Which of course doesn’t mean that a “let’s invade Iraq” sentiment spontaneously materialized in the minds of hundreds of millions of people as a result of what we saw on television two years before.
But it was an emotionally distressing time, and the range of possible outcomes was extremely wide.
If Bush had wanted to whip people up into an inward-looking demagogic fervor instead of an external-facing one, he clearly could have accomplished that, too. War on Terror 1 was crazy, and people were prepared to be led in all kinds of directions.
It’s on some levels obvious that we are all very much living in a world that Osama bin Laden made. But on others I think it’s still somewhat underrated how deeply contingent everything was.
An avoidable event
I think appreciation of the contingency starts with observing that the whole idea of hijacking airplanes in order to destroy the World Trade Center is eccentric.