“The 9/11 terrorist attacks were a really big deal” is perhaps not the hottest take in the world. But as time has passed and a larger and larger share of the population was either not yet born or else — like my Co-Host Jerusalem — not an adult at the time, I think the sheer extent to which history really pivoted on that day can get lost. Younger people who know all about the ways in which the American foreign-policy response went wrong don’t necessarily have the full context for understanding what the prior trajectory of the country was and how things changed.
The episode starts with a review of the literal facts of what happened.
As Jerusalem observes, “Every time you read about almost any major event in U.S. history or in world history or whatever, the contingencies are really shocking.” The plot itself was by no means foreordained to succeed. One prospective hijacker was even arrested before the attack, but the F.B.I. failed to crack the case in part because the legal standard at the time made it difficult for them to get a warrant to search his laptop. Two hijackers had been positively identified as al-Qaeda associates by the C.I.A. and were nonetheless able to enter the country with lawful visas. If the attack had been foiled, that would still have merited a response. But the emotional and political impact would have been dramatically reduced and the national-security response completely different. It also seems likely that if the attack had occurred under an Al Gore administration, the immediate political aftermath would have gone more to questions of the failure to prevent the attack rather than toward a hawkish politics of national unity.
But we got the attack and we got the response that we got.
Looking back from a generation later, liberals tend to appreciate the effort that George W. Bush made to express solidarity with American Muslims and direct public anger away from hate crimes, even as they of course bemoan the fact that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ended up costing many more lives than the attack itself. An argument I make on the podcast is that these really are in some sense two faces of the same coin — just as it’s no coincidence that many of the leading “neocon” foreign-policy hawks of that era went on to become prominent dissenters from the later MAGA turn in the Republican Party. The grandiose vision of democratizing the world at gunpoint, however deeply misguided, was in a very real sense an expression of liberal ideals about democracy and human rights and universal values. The failure of those wars is, in an important way, one of the major origin points of the contemporary crisis of global liberalism.
Jerusalem pushes back on the effort to impute so much good faith to the architects of the Iraq War in particular, making the reasonable point that nothing about liberalism or cosmopolitan values particularly suggests responding to a terrorist attack by attacking a country that had nothing to do with it.
I take the point. But I do want to beg for the mercy of younger progressives who have nothing but scorn for those of us who got caught up in war fever. If you can sympathize with the impulse to shrug off wild 2020-vintage takes with the line that “Woke 1 was crazy,” you understand the tremendous emotional impact of repeatedly viewing the footage of George Floyd’s killing. Consider watching thousands of people die. Bush used the considerable agenda-setting power of the presidency to frame the debate in a way that aligned his hawkish agenda with a kind of expressive maximalism about human equality and the universal appeal of liberal values.
It was a tremendous mistake, and not only is the world in general still paying a price, but so is the larger cause of liberalism. It’s why I think a revival will ultimately have to be led by people of Jerusalem’s vintage and younger, those able to learn from the mistakes of the past without being tainted with complicity in them.
Later this month on the pod, Jerusalem and I will be reading Friedrich von Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom.” If you have thoughts or questions about the book you’d like us to discuss, drop a line in the comments below!
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