Perhaps inevitably, that sense didn’t last for long. We might have lost our innocence and learned something about the world, but we did not suddenly become wise. Americans were facing the first case in a generation in which a chain of events that started overseas shook and changed all of our lives. It’s impossible to expect that we would respond by leaping to a new moral plane, or that we would immediately grasp the complexity of the global forces that had just come to harm us. Nor were we remotely prepared for the idea of modern asymmetric warfare.
Scanning AOL Instant Messenger away messages (which in retrospect represented an early-2000s forecast of what Twitter would be like), I saw a message from one friend that summed up how it looked to many: “Doesn’t Afghanistan know we have bombs?” It took a while to catch on to the idea that this was an attack on the United States not by the country of Afghanistan, but by Al-Qaeda, protected by the Taliban, which governed most Afghans but was not exactly an administration. We had been attacked by a transnational network, hosted by a rogue regime presiding over a failed state.
The responses were largely knee-jerk; a PATRIOT Act that undercut the freedoms that define America, and several quick steps down the slippery slope to torture. So slow were we to realize how fundamentally different this was than wars we had studied in school or seen in movies that by October we were bargaining against our own values, moving steadily and surely into the jaws of a trap that Al-Qaeda had laid for us.
IT WAS YEARS BEFORE I would get formal training in counterterrorism as a military officer, but it seemed clear even then as a history student that the new national approach on terrorism was likely to be self-defeating. The top priority of the terrorist—even more important than killing you—is to make himself your top priority. This is why protecting ourselves from terrorist violence is not enough to defeat terrorism, especially if we try to achieve safety in ways that elevate the importance of terrorists and wind up publicizing their causes. We all want to avoid being harmed—but if the cost of doing so is making the terrorist the thing you care about most, to the exclusion of the other things that matter in your society, then you have handed him exactly the kind of victory that makes terrorism such a frequent and successful tactic.
A spectacle of murder and destruction, though it killed far fewer people than ordinary gun violence, car accidents, or even cigarettes, had the power to loosen our commitment to freedom at home and shatter our restraints on involvement abroad. It was clear enough why America had to do something to Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but it was not clear what American values the administration was willing to compromise in the context of what it was starting to call the Global War on Terror. Would our civil liberties be diminished in the name of protecting us? Would the longtime certainty that America does not torture people hold? Would America commit to supporting freedom and democracy in deed as well as word, or would we back any dictator who claimed to side with us in the new global war, ignoring what was happening in his own country?
The answers started to pour in, mostly discouraging. Soon our government was sending prisoners to third-party countries for torture. It was supporting a grotesque dictatorship in Uzbekistan abroad and checking on people’s library usage at home, all in the name of fighting terrorism. At the same time, little was said about personal sacrifice at home for the purpose of winning a national conflict. Kids in World War II saved tinfoil from gum wrappers for the war effort, women reused nylon stockings as many times as possible, and everyone then knew why they were being asked to pay much higher taxes. This time around, it seemed that the war effort was wholly outsourced to those few Americans who served in uniform. America tripped over itself to salute them, without seeming to consider the possibility that civilians, too, could accept some risk or pay some contribution into the cause of freedom. I thought again of the names on that Civil War memorial wall as it became clear that this time, the task of dealing with this conflict would be assigned to a class of professional soldiers, not shared by all of our society on an all-hands-on-deck basis.
We might have had, in those years, a more serious conversation about what each of us owes to the country in a time of conflict. We might have been asked to weigh what risks we are willing to tolerate, personally, in order to remain certain that this is a free country. But after those first few seemingly enlightened days, the country’s leadership showed little interest in helping us confront the choices we would have to make between safety and freedom.
Truly grasping and defeating the logic of suicide terrorism was too much for our Congress or administration, which lapsed instead into simplistic rhetoric. Emblematic of this was the sudden adoption, by administration spokespeople and Fox News anchors, of the bizarre term “homicide bomber” instead of “suicide bomber.” It may have scratched an emotional itch, but the terminology was doubly useless, both belaboring the obvious fact that bombers are generally homicidal, and obscuring the tactically useful distinction between those murderers who are prepared to kill themselves in the process and those who are not.
Soon the president was telling us that “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” a dictum impossible for America to uphold or enforce in the case of Pakistan and many other states playing the three-dimensional chess game of geopolitics in the Islamic world. Next it was an “Axis of Evil,” and so on. For the home front, the message was that we would be kept safe through the deployment of force and the acceptance of some encroachments on our freedom and privacy. And also, for some reason, we would need to invade Iraq.
As a student, I couldn’t see for myself what this all was wreaking upon our politics until I went home for the summer of 2002 and volunteered on the campaign of Jill Long Thompson, who was running as a Democrat for the U.S. House seat in South Bend. The typical rule is that the president’s party fares badly in a midterm election, but there was no indication that that would happen this year. Democrats, unsure of themselves, were afraid to sound like an opposition at all, and many carefully avoided opposing the Iraq War for fear of looking unpatriotic. (Some, particularly Hillary Clinton, would come to regret this posturing.) Instead they tried to change the subject, emphasizing Social Security and Medicare, even though global security was the dominant issue of our moment—even in Indiana.
One hot day that summer, I was sent to help with the Fulton County Democratic Party’s entry in a rural small-town parade. As we prepared our little float with campaign signs and balloons, I did a double-take at the parade entry next to us, belonging to “Kountry Kidz Day Care.” A group of cute, rambunctious ten-year-olds in red T-shirts proudly showed me their float, which consisted of a large, uneven pair of four-foot-high model skyscrapers made out of foam core. Around the top of the gray rectangular objects a loose wrap of fishnet and mesh suggested dark smoke, while flames made of orange construction paper shot out the side of one of the objects, surrounded by cotton balls representing more billowing smoke. A big American flag shared the flatbed that carried this strange scene, and a sign on the back read UNITED WE STAND. This was a rural Indiana kids’ day-care craft project, circa July 2002: they had made a little 9/11.