A poll lately showed that nearly 3/4ths of Canadians say American foreign policy was the root cause of 9/11. At NRO, Tom Nichols addresses this:
The real problem here is that the Canadian poll results are just another example of a kind of denial that has set in among certain people, both inside and outside of the United States, over the past five years. These people desperately want to find some reason, some issue that can be solved, as the mainspring behind Islamic terrorism. Otherwise, they would have to confront the terrible reality that there is nothing we can give the terrorists that will stop the killing. We can change our policies, but we can’t change our culture or beliefs—or at least change them enough to suit the Islamic fascists who would turn the world into one big Taliban-run Afghanistan if they could. And so rather than face the fact that we’re at war with a relentless enemy with whom no negotiated peace is possible, such people retreat into fantasies about how the whole thing could be settled somehow if we could only figure out how to stop doing whatever it is they don’t like.
His analysis would explain something that bothered me from yesterday. I was watching CNN, and they showed the results of a poll that showed that a majority (or at least a plurality) of young people were inclined to blame the Bush administration for 9/11, while older generations leaned slightly more in favor of blaming the Clinton administration or no administration at all. OK, first of all, I think it’s a rather idiotic idea to blame any American administration for 9/11. But if you had to blame one, how could you blame the Bush administration, which was barely 9 months old by 9/11? In government terms, that’s definitely not enough time to achieve anything!
Personally, part of me would kind of like to blame the Clinton administration, but I think that’s also ridiculous. The culpability for 9/11 rests solidly, surely, solely on the shoulders of the Islamic terrorists who plotted it and the Islamist organizations and administrations that supported them doing so.
What Americans did in the 90’s, including the Clinton administration (who had enough information about what was going on that you’d hope they’d have been able to see things a little more clearly), was deny the reality of the war that was being waged against us. I think that what really happened to us was that we weren’t able to see what was going on. The perspective as of 9/10 was that America was invulnerable to terrorist attack, except overseas (or perhaps by locally grown nutcase militia-types).
So many red flags were raised during the run-up to the 9/11 attacks–the hijackers on one of the flights were actually considered “suspicious” but all it meant was that their bags were kept off the flight until they’d been confirmed as passengers. Collectively, no one understood that these were suicide bombers–it took us years, I think, to conceive of the fact that there’s an enormous faction within the Islamic world that would die to kill us. We simply were not equipped, as of that morning of 9/11, to understand what was happening.
I remember hearing (or reading) that the first denizens of the post-9/11 world order were the passengers of United 93. These people had enough time to figure out what was happening, and took the sort of actions that were necessary to prevent bringing down the Capitol or the White House. Conventional wisdom with hijackings was to give ‘em what they want, cooperate and do hostage negotiations with them. (Hmmm–that term “conventional wisdom” again.) But no one planned on hijackers who wanted nothing more than to be killed while killing as many Americans as they possibly could. The passengers of United 93 processed this information remarkably well, and did what they needed to do to prevent the disaster becoming greater than it already was.
This is the same sort of initiative that ordinary Americans showed when they took down the Shoe Bomber when he was attempting a suicide bombing of his own, and what we expect to see should terrorists attempt something similar in the future.
Now terrorists have to escape not only governmental notice, but also the notice of the ordinary people around them. Their plots, accordingly, have to have a much greater level of sophistication, and because at all times people are attuned to look for these sorts of plots, the terrorists are much more likely to be caught. Witness, for instance, the recent barrage of arrests for people who were buying suspicious numbers of untraceable cell phones–even though these apparently weren’t what we thought they were, it’s good to see that they were flagged.
Yes, the terrorists only have to get lucky once, but their odds have diminished exponentially since their own success on 9/11. It’s like a computer virus exposing a hole in a popular program–the first virus might cause a massive problem worldwide, but they also help the software developer to not only patch the hole that they exploited, but also to watch for similar holes in the future. With each successful attack, the developers learn how to create more robust security measures. I think that the defensive side of the War on Terror is going to work this way, because even though we’re back to navel-gazing and sniping at other Americans, we’re attuned to security risks as we travel and go about our daily lives. And simply put, we weren’t attuned to these risks before 9/11.
So do I think it’s right to blame any one administration (even one that I think was off-base in many ways) for us being so vulnerable to terrorists on 9/11? No. We were unable to process information correctly to see what was happening, from the highest levels of government on down. The few people who were warning about the possibility of a devastating terrorist attack on American soil really were considered little more than paranoid conspiracy theorists. I guess that we needed a reality check–and did we ever get one.
Do we need another reality check?
I’ve started to wonder if we’re due for another reality check. It seems like a growing part of the American public really believes that there is some solution that we can turn to, some set of incentives that we can hand over to Islamists that will make them go away and leave us alone. They’re not agreed, I think, on what that solution might be, but they persist in believing that there is such a thing.
However, I’m pretty sure that there isn’t a solution to it. These people believe in the axiomatic truth that the West, all that it produces, and all that it represents are evil and must be eradicated. And how do you negotiate with someone who believes that the greatest good would be extinguishing your nation and your culture? I would argue that it’s impossible. I think the greater portion of conservatives (and a smaller portion of liberals) agree.
If the political currents really are trending the way that it looks like they are, with netroots activists advocating a widespread political trend toward anti-Americanism (considered “dissent” against “the system”), I doubt that continued conservative leadership is going to do anything but further enrage that faction and inflate their numbers. Perhaps it would be best, if they are becoming as widespread as it seems, that they get their own in power.
I shudder to think of the consequences if this does happen, because I believe that it will mean that we busily go about burying our national head in the sand again, leaving ourselves vulnerable for something new on the scale of 9/11 (or worse?). But sometimes people refuse to learn by example or secondhand, and it appears that this younger generation, particularly, along with the growing portion of radical leftists, learned a weird set of lessons from 9/11 and its aftermath, particularly the Iraq war.
Do you think that a horrific terrorist attack which happened on the watch of their own administration would suffice to convince the hardened deniers-of-reality that we’re dealing with a real foe that has no other goal but destroying us and all that we stand for? Then again, maybe they’d just say it was all the fault of the previous administration (Bush and the Republican Congress).
I’d hope that we can eventually come together as a people, and realize that we should defend ourselves against our foes. It seems weird to me that one has to rely on wishful thinking that one’s own country would decide that it should defend itself. It seems like there are a whole lot of people out there–that is, American and European people–that would like, with the Islamists, for the American nation and culture to be exterminated. Am I wrong?
Posted by Kjirstin 
