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“The world solemnly marked the 20th anniversary of 9/11 on Saturday, grieving lost lives and shattered American unity in commemorations that unfolded just weeks after the bloody end of the Afghanistan war that was launched in response to the terror attacks.” AP News
The right highlights the country’s success in preventing further attacks but also stresses the importance of learning from our failures.
“On the twentieth anniversary of September 11, 2001, as New Yorkers commemorate those who died in the nation’s most devastating terrorist attack, they can also take quiet pride in what hasn’t happened since then, or, as President Bill Clinton once put it, the dog that didn’t bark…
“Despite relentless attempts of varying levels of sophistication and competence, neither militant Islamists nor other hate-filled ideological or religious extremists have managed to stage a comparable attack on the city. That is no accident. Thanks to an innovative, ambitious, and well-resourced counterterrorism program, the New York Police Department has foiled some 51 terrorist plots against the city since 9/11, at least 16 of them serious—more than those aimed at all other American cities combined.”
Judith Miller, City Journal
“It was easy to depose the Taliban, easy to topple Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gaddafi. It wasn't even that hard to cripple al Qaeda, the organization that actually attacked us, notwithstanding that it took us a decade to finally assassinate Osama bin Laden. But none of these wars demonstrated our mastery of events...
“On the contrary: The Taliban outlasted us in Afghanistan, as they were always likely to do. The decapitating wars in Iraq and Libya yielded chaos and the rise of a new terrorist Islamic State that in turn had to be defeated. And the Arab Spring ended in revived dictatorship in Egypt and brutal civil war in Syria…
“The lesson of Sept. 11 was that we were much less secure than we thought — that in an interconnected world, chaos ‘over there’ could come home. Therefore, we would only really be secure when we had tamed chaos, and made the whole world sufficiently like us that our values and interests would be in harmony. The lesson of the 20 years since is that we not only cannot master chaos, we often sowed it in our wake; that we not only cannot mold other societies in our image, but instead often provoke a reaction that pushes them in precisely the opposite direction.”
Noah Millman, The Week
“The five surviving al-Qaeda jihadists believed to be most culpable, led by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, have still not been tried, two decades after the attacks, and more than 15 years after their capture. The military commission is now before its fifth judge. Though pretrial proceedings resumed this week after the latest delay (18 months, due to COVID-19), the trial is not imminent…
“President George W. Bush rightly realized, after 9/11, that our law-enforcement approach to counterterrorism had been a failure. He tried to shift the paradigm. In many ways, he succeeded: treating the threat as a national-security challenge rather than a crime problem, exploiting the laws of war to kill and capture terrorists in their overseas nests. These measures kept our country safe. On the other hand, the military-commission system has been a failure…
“The men who mass-murdered thousands of our fellow citizens smirked in a Guantanamo Bay courtroom this week. Like their Taliban allies, they are still tormenting us 20 years later.”
Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review
“As a college sophomore, I wrote for my school paper about how the class of 2021 was the first to have no memory of the attacks. Now, we’ve graduated, so it’s safe to say that virtually every current college student has no memory of 9/11… As we slide back along the time axis, there’s a break in the graph, a dividing line between those who remember and those who don’t — a discontinuity in our national memory. I’m on the other side of that discontinuity, as are about 80 million other Americans. That number will only continue to grow as time advances…
“The 9/11 Memorial & Museum in New York counts 1,190 memorials across the United States. There are 9/11 memorials in Rexburg, Idaho, Central City, Neb., Tunica, Miss., Ashland, Ohio, and Rockland, Maine. Many of those 1,190 memorials are located at schools. Those who built them there were wise to do so…
“As time presses onward, and fewer people have individual memories of the attacks, commemorating 9/11 must be done together, or it won’t be done at all. We’ve done well honoring those who lost their lives these first 20 years. Let’s keep at it so that those of us who can never remember can live in — and raise our children in — a nation that never forgets.”
Dominic Pino, National Review
The left highlights the need to fund healthcare for survivors and argues that the War on Terror was too costly.
The left highlights the need to fund healthcare for survivors and argues that the War on Terror was too costly.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) writes, “Today, more than 110,000 responders, residents, students, and office workers are sick with 9/11-related illnesses. Every year that number grows. New diseases continue to emerge, and there is still so much to learn, particularly about the impact of exposure on the thousands of children and students caught in the toxic debris that day…
“It has become clear that the funding levels provided to the World Trade Center Health Program cannot keep up with the increased cost of caring for sick responders and survivors. In the coming weeks, Congress will consider a reconciliation bill full of important spending priorities. I, along with my colleague Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), believe it’s imperative that we use this reconciliation bill opportunity to raise the spending caps for the World Trade Center Health Program…
“It is time for us once again to do our part — to legislate and ensure that everyone made sick from exposure on 9/11 never has to question whether the federal government supports them.”
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, The Hill
“We need to move beyond 9/11 — beyond the hubris that made us think we could remake the world by force, beyond the ever-present temptation to use a catastrophe to justify projects already in mind before disaster struck...
“What we did right after 9/11 was inspired not by grandiose plans but by a painstaking response to more ordinary failures: the failure to understand and act upon available intelligence, the lack of cooperation among agencies charged with keeping us safe, the inability to grasp how much damage could be inflicted by enemies far less powerful than us…
“What we don’t need and shouldn’t want are bombastic declarations of American purpose on Sept. 11, 2021. Far better would be sober remembrances of the heroes and the fallen; realistic assessments of what it will take to protect our people; and a pledge not to remain mired in the feelings, impulses and mistakes that followed a tragic moment. All this, and prayers that we might never again confront a misfortune of this sort.”
EJ Dionne Jr, Washington Post
“One of the enduring tragedies of 9/11 is that we didn’t learn more from it. Sure, we figured out how to stop guys with box cutters from turning airliners into weapons, and our intelligence services did develop new methods for tracking and thwarting terrorist threats…
“But simultaneously, the United States launched misguided wars and implemented misguided policies that led to the sacrifice of thousands of American soldiers, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians, the undermining of both the professed values of the United States and its reputation across the globe...
“We tortured. We invaded. We bombed. We locked up people in secret prisons. In the end, we had little to show for it while millions of people elsewhere paid the price, coping with the profound loss of life and the massive local and regional instability that US actions caused.”
David Corn, Mother Jones
“Was it worth it? A good-faith effort to answer this question — to tally the costs and benefits on the ledger and not just resort to one’s ideological priors — is more challenging than you’d think. That’s largely because it involves quantifying the inherently unquantifiable...
“If, as proponents argue, the war on terror kept America safe, how do you quantify the psychological value of not being in a state of constant fear of the next attack? What about the damage of increased Islamophobia and violent targeting of Muslims (and those erroneously believed to be Muslims) stoked by the war on terror? There are dozens more unquantifiable purported costs and benefits like these…
“But some things can be measured. There have been no 9/11-scale terrorist attacks in the United States in the past 20 years. Meanwhile, according to the most recent estimates from Brown University’s Costs of War Project, at least 897,000 people around the world have died in violence that can be classified as part of the war on terror; at least 38 million people have been displaced due to these wars; and the effort has cost the US at least $5.8 trillion, not including about $2 trillion more needed in health care and disability coverage for veterans in decades to come… Even with an incredibly generous view of the war on terror’s benefits, the costs have vastly exceeded them.”
Dylan Matthews, Vox
A libertarian's take
“Most people alive and old enough to remember can tell you where they were around the time the strikes occurred (hours before the attack, I had walked down a corridor at the Pentagon that one of the planes ripped through) and can recall the ensuing horrifying images and America’s national trauma. If you would ask those same Americans, however, why Osama bin Laden attacked the United States so brutally, most people would not be able to tell you… Any surprise attack by one party on another is usually regarded as treachery, but such strikes rarely occur without a point of contention with the target of the attack…
“Because the U.S. government never admitted that U.S. interventionism in the Middle East motivated bin Laden to attack the United States on 9/11, America still continues to inflame Islamist groups around the world with its attempts to suppress them. Interventionists in the U.S. foreign policy establishment claim that it is naïve to think that radical Islamists will not attack U.S. targets if the American government is not battling them all over the world. What is naïve is believing that you can get rid of terrorism through endless war instead of dealing with the root causes of it.”
Ivan Eland, American Conservative
