9/11: Ten years later, how America has changed

“Sept. 11 is the day that never ends,” said Richard Cohen in The Washington Post. Ten years have come and gone since hijacked planes crashed into the twin towers and the Pentagon, and yet our wounds remain fresh, and our country is still at war. I was in Lower Manhattan when the World Trade Center fell, and went home that night with shoes covered with dust and “a hate that was entirely new to me.” In our grief and understandable rage over the murder of 2,977 innocent people, we marched off to war, first in Afghanistan and then, at the behest of the Bush administration, in Iraq, “even though it was not Saddam Hussein who attacked us.” Today, American troops continue to die in Afghanistan—partly because of the horrifically bloody and expensive diversion of Iraq. And what do we have to show for this decade of conflict? “Our enemy Iran” now has more influence than ever in the region, while Afghanistan remains a failed state. Our nation, meanwhile, bears “little or no resemblance to the heroic America we glimpsed on 9/11 and the days that followed,” said Frank Rich in New York. Yes, Osama bin Laden is now dead, and al Qaida is largely defeated. But “our economy and our politics are broken,” and national unity has given way to bitterness and pessimism.

That’s because “9/11 worked,” said Andrew Sullivan in Newsweek. It may have failed spectacularly to advance bin Laden’s ultimate goal of promoting a radical Islamic caliphate in the Mideast, but when Americans saw the World Trade Center’s iconic towers tumbling to the ground, and the “mighty Pentagon” in flames, we became unhinged by fear. So we took bin Laden’s bait. Dick Cheney and the Bush administration convinced panicked Americans that al Qaida was a “greater threat than the Nazis and the Soviets,” thus justifying any and all responses. So we tortured not only al Qaida leaders but legions of young Muslims, tore Iraq apart at an “incalculable” cost in lives and money, and “destroyed American moral standing in the world.”

What utter nonsense, said former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo in The Wall Street Journal. Those claiming America overreacted to 9/11 are ignoring a simple fact: We’ve gone 10 years without another attack. For that, we must credit the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism tactics, including the interception of suspected terrorists’ phone calls and e-mails, and the “tough interrogation of a few high-ranking al Qaida leaders.” The intelligence we extracted allowed the U.S. to disrupt numerous plots, including plans to bomb offices, apartment blocks, and airliners. And it’s helped the military kill or capture “most of al Qaida’s first and most capable leaders,” including bin Laden. Despite these successes, “al Qaida and its imitators are still dangerous,” said The Economist. Radical Islamists in Yemen, Pakistan, and Western nations are constantly looking for vulnerabilities to exploit. “There can be no return to the innocence of Sept. 10, 2001—and, sadly, no end to the vigilance.”

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But how long must we maintain our “single-minded focus on Islamic fanaticism”? asked Anne Applebaum in The Washington Post. During the past decade, while we spent $3 trillion on wars and the creation of a vast security bureaucracy of 1,200 agencies, our country’s infrastructure crumbled, millions of jobs went abroad, and our dependence on foreign oil grew. Meanwhile, China emerged as both a mighty commercial hub and a true global power. In the Arab world, we aligned ourselves with tyrants we thought would help us defeat Islamic terrorism. No wonder we’re now viewed with suspicion in Egypt and Tunisia. “Ten years on, could it be that the planes that hit New York and Washington did less damage than the cascade of bad decisions that followed?”

As scarred as America might be, our nation’s ideals remain largely intact, said Kathy Kiely in National Journal. Yes, there have been pockets of xenophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry, but since 9/11 we’ve elected two Muslims to the House of Representatives—“the first of their faith to serve in Congress.” We also elected a man to the White House with the middle name Hussein, who promised to get us out of Iraq, and has largely succeeded. Dissent—briefly considered unpatriotic in the months following the attacks—is alive and well. “It was a rough decade, but we survived as a democracy that embraces pluralism and debate and one that questions authority.” And that, on an otherwise sad anniversary, “offers us something to celebrate.”