Three Years Later

At the Republican National Convention in New York City just a little while ago, there was a great deal of romanticizing of 9-11-01. It was a day, we heard, that demonstrated the best in America. And in many ways it was. But 9-11 as a great triumph of the human spirit isn't the 9-11 I recall on the ground. I remember it as a terrifying, horrible, confusing day followed by several terrifying, horrible, confusing weeks.

I don't know how it felt out in the vast American Expanse to the south and west of New York City, but for those of us -- a very large proportion of America's political, intellectual, and media elite -- whose roots and physical existence are and were in the Boston-Washington corridor it was a time spent under seige. On the day in question, no one quite new what was happening. It seemed inevitable that there would be more attacks, and soon, very possibly on slightly lesser cities like Boston. And with the coming of the Anthrax Scare it looked like there were more attacks. The country was mobilizing for war in Afghanistan, a war that -- at the time at least -- raised the specter of being a real war of the old school with high casualties and all. And if that's what it took to win, most of us were prepared to accept it. But for those of us under 40 it was the prospect of something we'd never experienced and it was destined to occur in a far-off land of which we knew little.

And how would the Islamic world react? People feared at the time that there might be riots, revolutions, regimes toppled, the entire US-sponsored order in the Greater Middle East collapsing like the house of cards it in many ways was and is.

Fortunately, the worst didn't happen. The Afghan War was, in many ways, mishandled, but it wasn't the bloody affair many -- including many of its supporters -- thought it might be. The Anthrax thing fizzled out. The attacks of 9-11 proved not to be the beginning of a massive wave of lethal violence unleashed on the United States. The regimes held, the world order stood up. The Taliban was successfully removed. People danced in the streets of Kabul, broke out their old VCRs and Bollywood films. Events at home began to calm down. Soon enough one no longer saw HAZMAT teams on campus every time someone spilled some laundry detergent -- a white powder easily mistaken by the panicky for a bioweapon -- on the ground somewhere. People stopped wondering if Harvard University, like the World Trade Center, was a symbolic target of cosmopolitan American worthy of an al-Qaeda attack or whether, as a decentralized sprawling institution, it just wasn't appealing enough. I stopped hearing reports that high schools in New York were being evacuated in response to bomb scares. Advertisements and regular programming returned to network television. Forecasts of the end of irony in our culture proved false.

In a lot of ways, then, we emotionally overreacted to the attacks as a country. It turned out that many fewer people died at the WTC than it had first appeared. And it turned out that there were many fewer attacks en route than it had first appeared. Following from that, our policy response has been, in many ways, an overreaction. As a country we've thrown key elements of the rule of law aside and, in Iraq, basically abandonned all common sense in pursuit of a massively ill-conceived war.

At the same time, we've underreacted fairly massively. I spent the hours, days, and weeks after 9-11-01 on the campus of the major university, and for a little while it felt to me that great things my be afoot. America, clearly, was entering a new period of its national existence and there was going to need to be a national mobilization. As in the past -- and as, in particular, during the coldwar -- the universities would play a role. We needed knowledge-production on a massive scale. We needed to train a large new cadre of Arabic speakers, and smaller corps of speakers of Turkic and Persian tongues. The students of the 21st century would learn Middle Eastern history, Islamic thought, the geography of Central Asia. The children of the elite would end their decades-long alientation from all things military. There was going to be a great National Conversation about what it all meant and what to do about it.

It hasn't happened. The nation -- not only the "average American" but the permanent governing class here in Washington -- remains astoundingly ignorant about obviously relevant things. The national conversation is stuck on an astoundingly naive debate about whether "they" hate us because of our policies or because of who we are. Who "they" are seems barely examined. That "they" might -- like all the actual people I know -- be subject to complicated motivations that are not entirely transparent even to themselves, seems barely to be considered. People have almost no idea what al-Qaeda actually is, and the sort of people I work with -- the sort of people whose job it is to be aware of what is known and what is disputed among the experts -- have almost no familiarity with the contours of the controversy. People -- well-informed people even -- are wracked with confusions between Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Their names aren't even really similar. I only learned a few weeks ago that "Abu" is not a first name at all, but rather something akin to a Russian patronymic working in reverse. The fact that October 2001 through February 2002 proved not to be the disaster many feared has lulled the nation into a false sense of complacency. People don't realize that 9-11 has, in fact, been followed up by a fairly massive wave of violence, albeit violence that's largely occurred outside the United States of America.

Don Rumsfeld wrote a while back that we not only don't know if we're succeeding in the war on terrorism, we don't even have metrics of success. And he was right. We get jammed up in a conversation about whether the GWOT is "really" a war, and don't talk about the fact that whatever it is (I think "war" is a serviceable term) we don't really know who it's directed against. We don't know what we're trying to do, we don't know if we're succeeding at doing it, and we have barely any idea how we're going to figure it out. We're in the midst of an impassioned political campaign in which I -- like many others -- have become, somewhat against or wills and intentions, a fairly active (albeit fairly unimportant) participant. But whoever wins will still be faced with the reality that ignorance -- public, official, and elite -- is massive. Confusion is still as widespread as it was on 9-12-01 but back then we at least felt confused. Like Socrates we knew, to some extent at least, what we did not know. Now the worst are filled with passionate intensity. The ratio of unknown unknowns to known unknowns is frighteningly high.

I'm afraid. Not in the panicky way I was afraid three Septembers ago, but a deeper, less intense but more profound fear that we may have made some horrible mistakes and we have barely any idea what to do about them.