September 11, 2001, Approximately 8:50 AM
The early morning phone call, the TV images, the fire, the second plane, the Pentagon, the collapses... then the fear, the shutdown of my campus, tanks in the street, and the drive to the hopsital to give blood.... 9/11 was a blur for a college student in Washington DC.
There was little time to think or reflect. The horror, the terror, was too real, and it only seemed to go away when action merited. By evening, however, when there was little left to do, and when the immediate fear of yet another attack began to subside, a growing fear, not visceral but rational and reflective, began to grow inside.
Global terrorism had struck a great blow, but the next move would be ours. Crisis brings out the best in people, but it also had the potential to bring out the worst, and how the people, and the government, of the United States and its allies reacted to this crisis could define the future of the country, and the world.
That evening, at approximately 8:30 p.m., we got our first glimpse of what would happen next.
The American people, and the world, had a lot of questions. Why did this happen? What do we do? And President George W. Bush’s address to the nation, less than 12 hours after the attacks, provided the answer --- not the right answer, but an answer that would fully illustrate what we would get wrong on 12 September.
Bush said that our freedom had been attacks. He said, “ America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining.”
He also established that all who harbour terrorists would be treated the same as terrorists.
These two statements fully illustrate the folly of Bush’s approach, and provides perhaps the root of what we refused to consider on the morning after.
What We Got Wrong
1. We were attacked over frustration with the political, economic, and foreign policies of the United States.
The Al Qa'eda leadership is nothing if not clear spoken on why they are upset at the US. The primary reasons, the root reasons, for their anger has everything to do with the US support of policies that, according to Al Qa'eda, have caused damage to Muslims in exchange for American imperialist gains. The US support of Israel is a problem, but the low standard of living in Palestine is more often discussed as a problem than, say, Israel’s choice of religion. The US presence in the holy cities of Saudi Arabia brings more criticism than "culture" within the US or Europe.
And Al Qa'eda, and other terrorist organizations, are not the only ones upset by these policies. Most people in the Middle East resent US economic and military imperialism. Al Qaeda offered a crude, deadly response to that reality.
This is perhaps the core of the problem, the biggest unlearned lesson of 9/12. By categorizing terrorism as an “attack on freedom”, Bush was playing the same game as Osama Bin Laden, branding political problems as ideological ones. Both men were defining the world as a dichotomy; for us or against us, GI Joe vs. Cobra, freedom vs. terror. Bush ignored the geopolitical reality that the US was engaged in a series of highly unpopular policies that would not, in the long run, strengthen the nation.
As a result, the US lost its ability to rethink geopolitical strategy in light of the new risk of increasing global terrorism. The US invaded Afghanistan, nominally to destroy Al Qa'eda but replacing a regime which was not focused on that global terrorism. Washington then installed a corrupt and unpopular government in Kabul that was, on paper, committed to the same goals as the US. The Bush Administration had delivered a message to the Afghanistan people that the US really was only interested in imperialist goals, and it was willing to kill Muslims in the process, feeding an insurgency that lasts to this day.
Meanwhile, the US did not commit enough resources to the Afghan conflict, in large part because Bush was preparing to open the next chapter of the for-us-or-against-us ideological campaign. The gathering storm over Iraq made sense for the limited worldview of George Bush’s false dichotomy, but it again confirmed, in the eyes of the disaffected, the claims of Al Qa'eda. So the war, rather than "Mission Accomplished", would produce an even stronger insurgency than the one in Afghanistan.
2. There is a clear distinction between the leadership of terrorist organizations and the membership of terrorist organizations. This is a distinction that our military commanders have made every day since General David Petraeus launched his counter-insurgency strategy that changed the course of the war in Iraq. "Terrorists" differ in their backgrounds , education levels, belief systems, behaviours, and motivations.
The leadership of terrorist groups is older, richer, more educated, have a wider exposure to the big picture, are often highly connected, and will rarely die for their cause (unless they are caught). We have had an image of these leaders as religious zealots, evil Mahatma Gandis, anti-Christ figures whose convictions drive them to destroy. What we should have known then, and now know, is that terrorist leaders are more David Koresh, the man who died with his followers in 1993 in Waco, Texas, than evil Mother Theresa. They have religious backgrounds, but they use these backgrounds to create cults of personalities and power structures led by their ego-maniacal goals.
And politics is almost always the root of their issues. Osama Bin Laden is a perfect example, disaffected Saudi Royalty living in a posh mansion surrounded by young wives and porn collections while his followers were living in caves and strapping bombs to their backs. These aren’t front-line commanders, but men of power who desire to manipulate and control. As such, they aren’t interested in our “freedoms.”
On the other hand, the “terrorists", the suicide bombers and such, are often less educated, poorer, non-clerics with no background in politics or religion. They are MUCH younger, almost always unemployed, and extremely desperate. They are frustrated by their state of existence, and the terrorist leaders offer a solution: kill those who (according to the highly political leadership) are responsible for your suffering, and if you die in the process, you will be granted paradise.
Why is this an important distinction to make? The primary reason is that the US failed to institute a policy that would starve the Al Qa'eda leadership of its membership. Military commanders often rely on a strategy that increases desertion rates of their opponent’s force while decreasing morale and the supply of new recruits. In this case, the US Government only provided evidence that everything the Al Qa'eda leadership said was true. By invading and occupying two countries and killing civilians in the process, the might of the US was pitted against a large segment of the population of the Middle East, a losing proposition.
There is another important consideration. If Al Qa'eda is an organization that is bent on the destruction of the US and its allies because of their interpretation of religion, then there is little we can do to stop them beyond killing every single Muslim fundamentalist. The reality, however, is that the leadership of terrorist organizations is driven by the politics of power, and the membership is driven by local economic and political considerations.
While we cannot work with the terrorist leadership, we might deal with its membership, but only if our response is focused and limited in scope. All politics is local, and since 9/11, most “terrorists” are local fighters, striking out as part of a local insurgency in response to perceived American imperialist policies that have led to the deaths of innocent civilians.
3. Radical Islamic Fundamentalism was not, and is not, on the rise.
Most governments in the Middle East fit into two categories, at least before the "Arab Spring": American allies, and governments that have remained defiant against (at least some) American actions in the region. Most governments that are pro-American have a history of repressive policies that subjugate dissenting opinion. Most of those governments also have state-sanctioned religious elements, a series of mosques and religious leaders that have been resistant to condemning geopolitical, or even regional, issues on religious grounds. The rise of dissident religious elements is a direct response to this phenomenon. However, very few of these organisations have ever turned violent towards the United States, Europe, or even Israel.
In short, there are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, but the Al Qa'eda network had only hundreds of members in Afghanistan. Islamic fundamentalism may be religious reality in parts of the Middle East, but it was never the primary trend, nor was it ever focused on violence. Even at the height of the post-Saddam chaos in Iraq, the vast majority of the population tried to avoid conflict
4. Scale. As someone who was in DC during 9/11, I don’t need to be told how horrifying and terrorizing that day was for Americans, or the entire world. But the 9/11 attacks were a wildly successful attack launched by 20 men who were supported by a few hundred more. The global War on Terror, on the other hand, has cost us far more US lives, an incredibly disproportionate amount of foreign civilian casualties, a simply massive amount of money, and it has not strengthened (indeed, it has weakened) American power.
5. The largest tragedy of 9/11 may be that the US, in its response to the crisis, failed to live up to its own ideological standards, and as a result "America" is no longer in a place to be the chief ideological promoter of freedom, equity, justice, or democracy. Our allies are not good allies. Some of the regimes that US backs are nearly as bad as the ones the US does not. The actions of Washington have directly or indirectly cost the Middle East hundreds of thousands of innocent lives in the last 10 years. the US has helped establish two oppressive and corrupt regimes...
Instead of being “the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world", the US squandered its greatest opportunity to rethink its position in the world.
Can these mistakes be overcome or reversed? Yes, but only if we acknowledge the mistakes in the first place. In all the memorial services for the dead, in all of the praise for the true heroes of 9/11 (the first responders, firefighters, police, rescue services), and in all the time that has passed since 9/11, we refuse to learn some lessons, because we have refused to ask, and truthfully answer, a single question:
"Is the United States really that beacon of freedom and democracy ?"
The terrorists believe the answer is no, and they are wrong. But the true potential of the United States to be a “beacon” has been blunted, and our refusal to confront that hard facts, and our poor response to 9/11, have made matters worse.
In February, the world watched as a peaceful pro-democracy movement struggled to survive against beatings and gunshots and arrests, just for speaking their mind. At the height of this struggle, one which seemed to be so deeply rooted in ideology that the US has built their nation on, an activist sent a tweet:
“The American Contribution to the Pro-Democracy Revolution.”
The tweet had a link to a picture: a tear gas canister with “Made in the USA” stamped on the side of it. Ten years later, if the peaceful protesters in the streets of Cairo think this way, and Americans refuse to change their geopolitical approach to the Middle East, then we have to ask a different question:
Did the terrorists win?