Today is the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary, I published on this blog two personal remembrances, one by Professor Buchanan on 9/9/2011 and another that I wrote on 9/11/2011. I revisited those recollections and added some more analysis in 2015 in response to a major terrorist attack in France. I won't reproduce any of those essays in full today, but I do want to draw on my 2011 and 2015 pieces to make a few observations about the circumstances in which Americans currently find ourselves as a nation.
To draw the linkages I wish to draw, I do need to quote briefly from my 2011 and 2015 essays. I'll take them in reverse order. My 2015 essay warned that following through on the bellicose language from then-President Hollande of France risked repeating the mistakes the U.S. made following 9/11. I wrote:
I am not advocating any particular policy path for France or the U.S. I am only saying that as we quite appropriately share in the grief of our friends in France, we and they should keep in mind that, while the use of overwhelming military force is sometimes a sensible policy, the fact that it is the first thing we think to do in our grief and anger does not mean it is in anyone's ultimate best interest.
Fortunately, France did not find itself in a forever war against ISIS. However, and more broadly, it seems that no one learned much of anything from the two decades of U.S. war in Afghanistan following 9/11. Shortly after October 7th, 2023, both Professor Buchanan (here) and I (here) compared what was then the emerging Israeli military response to the Hamas terrorist attack on Israeli civilians to the American response to 9/11. Unfortunately, we were right about what was to come.
By "what was to come," I have in mind Israel's terribly destructive war in Gaza, not the current terribly destructive war between, on one side, Israel, the United States, and reluctantly allied countries (Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, etc.) and, on the other, Iran and its proxies. The mistake the U.S. made after 9/11, that Israel made after October 7th, and that I worried France would make after the November 13, 2015 attacks was to commit to a military response out of something like rage without coldly calculating whether doing so would be advantageous, much less whether it could be conducted without causing unwarranted harm to innocents.
That was not the mistake made by Trump and those of his advisers who favored the current war (chiefly Pete Hegseth). They made many and less excusable mistakes in launching the current war. Indeed, it is not accurate to refer to what Trump and the administration have done as mistakes, a term that implies inadvertence. Their decision to take the country to war with Iran was a deliberate and highly culpable act.
What explains that act? As a military matter, the answer is hubris. Rendered overconfident by the relative ease with which U.S. forces had extracted Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela, Trump ignored those who warned him that Iran would be a much more difficult adversary.
But if hubris explains why Trump thought a decapitation strike against Iran would lead to a quick victory and regime change, it does not explain the decision to launch it at a time when the U.S. and Iran appeared to be making progress towards a negotiated resolution to the Iranian nuclear program. To explain that decision, one must resort to Trump's flaws as a human being, including: his unwillingness to accept any kind of nuclear deal that looked too much like the JCPOA President Obama negotiated and he abandoned; his utter disregard for international and domestic law; and his childish fascination with blowing things and people up.
So no, we are not repeating the post-9/11 mistakes. We--that is to say Trump and the Republicans in Congress who refuse to rein him in--are finding ways to do even worse.
What about the home front? My ten-year-anniversary 9/11 essay mostly focused on my own personal experience. I explained that my father's office had been on the 82nd floor of World Trade Center 2 but that thankfully he had retired before 2001. I also described my own eery feeling as the smoldering-but-not-yet-collapsed twin towers came into view from the Amtrak train I was riding on a trip home the morning of 9/11. I eventually pivoted to broader lessons and concluded as follows:
We--everyone born before, say, 1996 or so--are suffering from a kind of collective PTSD. It doesn't entirely impair our ability to function, and often we're completely unaware of it, but it can be triggered easily. Over time, of course, the trauma will fade. Perhaps some day, Americans will commemorate 9/11 the way we commemorate other solemn events, like Memorial Day--with a sale on cars, mattresses, and consumer electronics. That's how we'll know we've finally gotten over 9/11. I don't expect to see a 9/11 mattress sale in my lifetime. I hope to, but I don't expect to.
I'm tempted to say that we have almost entered mattress sale territory because J.D. Vance referred last week to the fact that we were "about to celebrate" the 25th anniversary of 9/11, but it's plain that Vance simply misspoke, as he immediately corrected himself by substituting "commemorate" for "celebrate." Vance has numerous flaws, but the fact that he occasionally (and no more than most others in public life) says the wrong word is not one of them.
That we haven't entered mattress sale territory is not to say that nothing has changed about how the country views 9/11. Joe Biden's best line as a presidential candidate in 2008 was that the only parts of a sentence coming out of Rudy Giuliani's mouth are "a noun, a verb, and 9/11." Although Biden was trying to make the point that Giuliani (who, at the time was a plausible candidate for the Republican nomination that eventually went to John McCain) was unqualified, the Biden attack line also revealed that already by October 2007 (when the debate occurred), someone who still was focused intently on 9/11 was an obsessive. In the nearly 19 years since that debate, 9/11 has receded much further in the American consciousness, to be remembered mostly on anniversaries like today.
That fading is a mixed blessing. Insofar as we've forgotten the lessons of the post-9/11 foreign policy disasters, we're worse off.
On the other hand, the fading of 9/11 has meant the fading of the associated PTSD. No one can live a full life in a state of constant high alert--which is what the domestic aftermath of 9/11 felt like, especially so because the Bush administration introduced an absurd set of color-coded threat levels. The level hovered for the better part of a decade between yellow (significant) and orange (high), even though the administration never released any guidelines about what individuals were supposed to do differently based on the threat level. The message seemed to be simply that Americans should adjust their state of anxiety between significant and high.
I will not, however, end on an optimistic note about the reduction of our collective anxiety or PTSD because we are daily--indeed sometimes more than hourly--made anxious and re-traumatized by the malignant narcissist in chief.
-- Michael C. Dorf