To Understand America’s Response to 9/11, Look at How America Changed Before 9/11

This Friday, September 17, at Noon ET, we’ll be joined by the third in our triad of guests on the “war on terror,” Spencer Ackerman. Spencer is an old colleague from The New Republic who for years has been doing invaluable reporting from inside the American national security state. In recent weeks he’s won acclaim for his book, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. Last week he wrote a column for The New York Times entitled, “How Sept. 11 Gave us Jan. 6.” Subscribe and you’ll not only be able to join this conversation, but can also watch past conversations with Ben Rhodes, Noam Chomsky, Omar Barghouti, and many others.

I hoped to write something in time for the 20th anniversary of 9/11 on why America reacted to the attacks as it did. But between our kids starting school, my own semester starting at CUNY, and the Jewish holidays, I couldn’t get it done in time. So I’m doing it now. If you’re sick of retrospectives, I understand—but this subject has fascinated and haunted me ever since that day. In this season of remembrance, I’m particularly thinking about my old boss and friend, Michael Kelly, who died at the beginning of the Iraq War. If you’ve never read his work, I invite you to help keep the memory of this beautiful, talented, hilarious man alive. 

On one foot, here’s my take on why America reacted so destructively to 9/11. (What follows draws heavily on my 2010 book, The Icarus Syndrome.) The US responded so destructively because, in the decade or so before 9/11—between roughly 1989 and 2001—the American foreign policy elite lost its fear of war.

People forget how afraid presidents of both parties had been of sending US troops to war in the aftermath of Vietnam. Jimmy Carter, who became president two years after Saigon fell, boasts that during his four years as president, “We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. We never went to war.” But it wasn’t just Carter. Ronald Reagan was terrified of another Vietnam too. Sure, he talked tough, and funneled money to the US military and anti-communist rebels and regimes. But in eight years, Reagan only sent US ground troops into harm’s way twice. In 1983 he invaded Grenada, whose army boasted a whopping 600 troops. That same year he sent peacekeepers to Lebanon before promptly withdrawing them after Hezbollah blew up their barracks. The latter decision haunted Reagan more than any other he made as president. His final words in office were: “The only regret I have after eight years is sending those troops to Lebanon.”

Though often remembered as an ultra-hawk, Reagan was so fearful of war that in his final year in his office, when a pugnacious State Department official named Elliott Abrams urged him to invade Panama to depose dictator Manuel Noriega, the Gipper adamantly refused. Compared to America’s post-9/11 wars, Panama was an easy mark. It contained roughly one-tenth as many people as either Afghanistan or Iraq. It was in America’s backyard. And the US had been deploying troops there since the 19th century. Moreover, Noriega was a brutal dictator up to his eyeballs in the drug trade at a time when polling showed that illegal drugs were the American people’s top concern. Yet Reagan adamantly refused to take any action that would require “counting up the bodies” of US soldiers. He was scared to death of another Vietnam. 

Between 1989 and 2001, that fear slowly dissipated—which laid the foundation for America’s disastrously hubristic response to 9/11. Things began to change the year after Reagan left office. In 1989, after Noriega roughed up some US soldiers, his successor, George H.W. Bush, decided to invade. At the time, it was considered a perilous gamble—but it worked. Noriega took refuge in the Vatican embassy in Panama City, but US troops smoked him out by blaring deafening rock music (including “You’re No Good” and “I Fought the Law and the Law Won”), which prevented him from sleeping. The US military restored Panama’s democratically elected president and deposited Noriega in a Florida jail. Bush’s approval ratings shot up to 76 percent. 

Panama was the first rung of a ladder. Had Bush slipped—had Noriega’s supporters retreated to the countryside and launched a bloody counterinsurgency campaign against the occupying Yanquis—I doubt the US would have gone to war two years later in the Persian Gulf. Bush’s success in Panama chipped away at the US foreign policy elite’s pessimism about ground wars. But despite it, American elites were still terrified of taking on Saddam after he invaded Kuwait in 1990. Carter’s former national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski—widely considered a hawk—warned the US might suffer 20,000 casualties. In his speech opposing the war, Senator John Kerry asked whether America was “ready for another generation of amputees, paraplegics, burn victims, and whatever the new desert war term will be for combat fatigue?” Kerry ended his speech by reading from a novel about a horrifically mutilated veteran of World War I who asks that his body be put on exhibit as a testament to the insanity of war. Congress approved Bush’s request to go to war, but it was the closest such vote since 1812.  

The war’s outcome astonished many foreign policy elites. The US didn’t just push Saddam out of Kuwait. It pushed him out in a ground campaign that lasted a mere one hundred hours. For Iraqis, the fighting was every bit as gruesome as Kerry had warned: The US killed roughly 100,000 Iraqis. But America lost only 146 of its own. After Bush declared victory, he and his top advisors—including Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell—basked in a victory parade in New York City attended by nearly five million people. “By God,” Bush exclaimed, “we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” Those may have been the most dangerous words he uttered in his entire life.

It’s hard to exaggerate the role the Gulf War played in laying the groundwork for America’s post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Gulf War helped inspire the 9/11 attacks themselves, since nothing infuriated Osama Bin Laden more than seeing US soldiers deployed on his native, sacred, Saudi soil. But the Gulf War also shaped America’s response to 9/11 because it sent a clear message to politicians in both parties: Supporting war can make your career. Opposing war can destroy it. Al Gore and Joe Lieberman—two of the only ten Senate Democrats to back the war—ended up on the party’s ticket in 2000. By contrast, Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, who had been considered one of his party’s most electable moderates, passionately opposed the war and thus ruined his chances at a presidential run. Eleven years later, when John Kerry and Joe Biden—who both opposed the Gulf campaign—got a second chance to vote on a war against Saddam Hussein, they made sure not to make the same political mistake twice.

But Panama and the Gulf War, by themselves, can’t explain the military overconfidence that afflicted much of the American foreign policy class on the day the Twin Towers fell. The Balkan wars played a key role too. 

Growing up, a whole generation of liberals had been told that every American war would be Vietnam. But Panama wasn’t, Kuwait wasn’t—and then Serbian forces began building concentration camps in southeastern Europe. If the Gulf War made supporting war seem politically savvy, Bosnia—for a large group of liberal intellectuals and activists, including me—made it seem moral. Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, was multi-ethnic, tolerant, and cosmopolitan. And in the early 1990s, its people were being ravaged, exterminated, by fascists. For many liberals, the effect was profound. Early in Bill Clinton’s presidency, twenty-seven progressive groups—many with deep anti-war traditions—jointly demanded war. Analogies to the 1930s and 1940s—which Vietnam had made deeply suspect on the American left—returned. At the dedication of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Elie Wiesel pleaded that “something, anything, be done.” Todd Gitlin, renowned for his student anti-war activism in the 1960s, declared, “Bosnia isn’t Vietnam. It’s Spain.”  

Further shamed by his failure to act against genocide in Rwanda, Clinton finally began bombing Serbia in 1995. Yet again, the war appeared to succeed. A Croatian ground-offensive combined with NATO airpower forced the Serbs to negotiate a peace deal that ended the fighting and left Bosnia intact, barely. And, yet again, the cost for Americans appeared low. In the entire bombing campaign, not a single American died.

By 1999, the Clinton administration—flush with Bosnia’s success—had become far more aggressive. And when the Serbian regime appeared poised to ethnically cleanse Kosovo, the Clintonites did three things that would create an even more powerful template for America’s post-9/11 attacks. First, the US bombed Serbia even though it wasn’t attacking another country. Unlike Bosnia, Kosovo wasn’t an independent state. It was merely a historically autonomous province. (Kosovo’s independence would come later.) Second, America’s war was preventive (or, in George W. Bush’s misleading phrase, “preemptive.”) Unlike in Bosnia, the US began bombing before most of the ethnic cleansing had even begun. Third, America attacked without the approval of the UN Security Council, which Russia blocked. It relied on NATO’s authority instead.

A preventive war, inside the borders of another country, waged without UN approval—only later would it become clear that Kosovo prefigured Iraq. In 1999, by contrast, what struck most foreign policy elites was that, yet again, America had won. Serbia’s murderous dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, withdrew his troops from Kosovo. A year later he was overthrown. In the entire Kosovo war, not a single American died in combat.

My point, in recounting this history, isn’t that the 9/11 attacks didn’t matter. They mattered a lot. Since Panama, foreign policy elites had been growing fonder and fonder of war. But September 11 left ordinary Americans frightened, confused, and enraged—and more willing to follow the foreign policy elite’s lead.

George W. Bush’s personality mattered too. Bush was an impulsive man inclined to make big bets based on gut feelings. In pickup softball games back in Texas, one observer noted, Bush had struck out a lot because he took “wild swings with lots of muscle. But he was swinging so hard, trying so hard, he didn’t take the chance to watch the ball.” Bush was also appallingly ignorant of the Muslim world. Asked during his 2000 presidential campaign about the Taliban, Bush looked dumbfounded. When the interviewer explained that they ruled Afghanistan, Bush chortled, “I thought you said some band.” As late as 2003, visitors to the Oval Office reported that Bush didn’t know Iraq was composed of both Sunni and Shia Muslims.

It also mattered that Bush chose Dick Cheney, the most aggressive of his father’s foreign policy aides, as his Vice President, and that Cheney installed allies like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz in key positions, thus checkmating Bush’s more cautious Secretary of State, Colin Powell.

Above all, it mattered that after 9/11, the US—working with the rebel Northern Alliance—toppled the Taliban in little over a month of fighting with few American lives lost. By 2002, Afghanistan had become yet another step on the ladder of American hubris. Bush and his top aides made the decision to invade Iraq at a time when it was still possible to believe—if you wanted to—that the war in Afghanistan was largely won, that the few Taliban holdouts would be quickly mopped up. And so just as Panama emboldened George H.W. Bush to fight the Gulf War and Bosnia emboldened Clinton to bomb Kosovo, all of these apparent successes, plus the apparent triumph in Afghanistan, emboldened George W. Bush to invade Iraq. “They won in Afghanistan when everybody said it wouldn’t work,” noted one observer in the run-up to Iraq, “and it’s got them in a mood of euphoric cockiness…They’re on a roll.”

If this all sounds overly deterministic, let me offer a caveat. Not everyone was intoxicated by apparent success. Samantha Power passionately supported America’s wars in Bosnia and Kosovo and in the process became one of America’s most famous liberal hawks. Yet she opposed the invasion of Iraq. (A stance for which today’s leftists don’t give her enough credit.) The late Tony Judt made the same distinction. 

But, on balance, in Washington, both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, were far more warlike on the eve of September 11 than they had been a decade before. It’s an old story: Success bred hubris, which bred disaster—an economic, political, and moral disaster whose consequences permeate the United States and the world.

Other stuff:

If you haven’t read Jennifer Senior’s Atlantic essay about 9/11’s effect on one American family, I recommend it highly.

See you on Friday,

Peter