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As the 20th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attack approaches, I was disappointed to see how negative the media coverage is. The global reporting is defeatist, focusing almost exclusively on how America has made countless mistakes and accomplished little or nothing – perhaps even exacerbating global problems.
An article by Garrett Graff in Atlantic was typical of the tone. Entitled “After 9/11 America Got Almost Everything Wrong,” he concluded the following, with each conclusion presented as a caption: (1) “As a society, we have succumbed to fear “. (2) “We have chosen the wrong path to seek justice.” (3) “At home, we have reorganized the government in the wrong direction. (4) “Abroad, we have wasted the goodwill of the world.” (5) “We have chosen the wrong enemies.”
For the sake of argument, let’s assume everything in this article is exactly correct. While there are many lessons to be learned from the many foreign (mis) adventures of the United States before and after 9/11, we also need to remember this: hindsight is 20/20, especially when you’ve had 20 years to reflect on what happened. .
So let’s rewind the tape two decades. I can tell you exactly where I was, what I was doing and what I was thinking on September 11, 2001. Any of us can.
*****
The phone rang around 7:50 a.m. central time. My father was on the other side. He told me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.
I was not interested. Surely it was an accident. Also, I was in second year at university and had much bigger worries: Tuesdays were my busy days. From 10 a.m. to noon, I had a microbiology lab. Then from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., I had an organic chemistry lab. Groggily, I hung up the phone and fell asleep again.
About 15 minutes later, the phone rings again. This is my father. “The second tower has been hit. You have to wake up. We are under attack.” I got up this time. I went upstairs and turned on the TV. My mouth dropped in disbelief. I called a friend and told her to wake up too.
Classes at my university weren’t canceled, so I got in my car and headed for school. I turned on the radio and listened to reporters describe how the first World Trade Center tower collapsed. Since I had never been to New York, I remember vividly thinking, “At least one tower will be there if I ever get the chance to visit it.” Then the other tower collapsed.
When I arrived at the microbiology lab, one of the professors had pulled a television into the hallway so that we could listen to the latest news. The teaching assistant reminded us that although none of us wanted to work, we still had homework to do. We all sat in silence as we worked. In the upper right corner of my lab notebook, where I always wrote down the date, I added the following line: “WTC Disaster”.
After the lab, I headed to the student center for lunch. People were crowded around the televisions. In the hallway, I remember a student saying, “This is what we get by electing George Bush.
Naturally, the students began to discuss ideas about who could have done this. Iraq? Iran? Palestinians? Nobody knew. What we believed was this: we are going to be attacked again. It was not about if corn when and or.
*****
My experience was not unique. Almost anyone old enough to remember 9/11 can recall the exact details of that day. How many other days are etched in your memory like this? Very little, if any. The point is this: We experienced a collective trauma that day. And the effects of this trauma lasted a very long time.
The truth is, we were scared. People around Bush were frightened as they thought the president might be assassinated with a missile while on Air Force One. This fact comes through very clearly in a new Apple TV + documentary, titled 9/11: inside the president’s war room. Former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice also notes that nearly 3,000 people have been murdered under their watch. Naturally, they felt a responsibility to never allow something like 9/11 to happen again.
That is why the United States reacted the way it did. More than three years after September 11, we were still concerned about terrorism – so much so that Bush stepped forward on a platform to beat him, and he was re-elected. It wasn’t until 2006, more than five years after the attack, that Americans began to realize that things were not going as planned, especially in Iraq. As a result, the American people handed Congress over to the Democrats, and in 2008, the presidency to Barack Obama.
But even then, the war on terrorism did not end. Obama made sure to track down Osama bin Laden, which happened successfully on May 2, 2011. (I remember exactly where I was when I heard this news too.) After the news of his death was announced. , thousands of Americans applauded in New York. and in front of the White House.
This is the emotional toll that September 11th caused in the United States. It is worth remembering this when we examine the past 20 years of foreign policy and war. Without a doubt, we have made a lot of terrible mistakes. But let’s also have a little humility and empathy as we analyze these mistakes, remembering why we made them in the first place.
As Rice asks in the aforementioned documentary, “What Would You Have Done?”
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