Walk your mind through as much of America’s last century as you know: two blood-bathed world wars, an economic depression, a Cold War that risked going split-atom hot, and now a decade’s tussle with global terrorism. Between these defining passages we’ve had calmer interludes that we like to call normalcy — if only to remind ourselves that crisis shouldn’t be any nation’s norm.
These alternating epochs arrive unannounced and elbow one another aside. During one morning’s aeronautical attack in 2001, this nation discarded the carefree holiday from history that traced to 11/9 — the date in 1989 when dispirited communism gave up on the Berlin Wall — for the combative era of 9/11. It was just that fast: One day Americans assume they’re invulnerable; the next day warriors armed with knives and ailerons are murdering them by the thousands.
These fierce swings of history’s pendulum shape each of us and our nation. Because of 9/11/01 and the tectonic forces it released, the United States of 9/11/11 has thicker skin and a harder attitude. Our alternation between an easygoing America and a muscular America is stuck, for who knows how long, on muscular.
Many of us, the Tribune’s editorial board included, have hoped for a decade that the urgency of this nation’s post-9/11 priorities — defeating enemies, creating a more vigilant intel infrastructure, advancing democracy in the world’s dangerous neighborhoods — would persist.
Ten years out, we can say that a harder America has kept its focus. Good.
‘An era of persistent conflict’
America has used this decade not perfectly, but well, to make itself safer. Administrations of both major political parties have shared the aggressive determination that this nation won’t let its guard lapse or its enemies walk free.
Imagine the public and political furor today if a U.S. president knew the whereabouts of an Osama bin Laden — that is, a terrorist who for years had been ratcheting up his attacks against U.S. interests — but didn’t launch missile strikes to take him out. That happened three times during the late 1990s, the 9/11 Commission reported in 2004.
Writing in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper didn’t dwell on how casually earlier officials had compartmentalized information and let process straitjacket action. He did, though, describe the shift from sharing intel based on the old “need to know” to today’s “imperative of ‘responsibility to share.'” That change, he said, better serves “our intelligence consumers — from the White House to the foxhole.”
Ah, the elegance of paradox: One specific result Clapper cited was how improved intel protocols finally had enabled … the May 1 killing of bin Laden.
Yet an era of zealous enemies with relatively easy access to lethal weaponry demands that our defenses, from intel to military capability, grow ever more sophisticated. The global threats now arrayed against America have created “a period of persistent conflict, with its toll on equipment, people, and national will,” the Pentagon said in a 2010 outlook on national security. “No one should harbor the illusion that the developed world can win this conflict in the near future.”
Overplaying their hand
The 9/11 plot, like the takedown of bin Laden, was a well-crafted assault. But its planners overplayed their hand. Bin Laden in particular believed, having emerged unscathed from the 1990s, that Americans were simply too unnerved by the sight of blood to forcefully respond: He would attack; we would emote but, eventually, fold. His 1996 fatwa announcing his war against the U.S. enumerated how quickly Americans had fled Lebanon and Somalia when U.S. soldiers started dying.
Instead, though, U.S. policymakers reacted to 9/11 not as a heinous crime deserving a criminal justice response, but with a deadly pursuit of the perpetrators. Not only did Americans refuse to forget the attack, they consistently have told pollsters they accept the costs of avenging it. No words better synthesized this nation’s uncharacteristic, long-haul commitment than a speech Sen. John McCain of Arizona delivered in 2004, three wearying years into a global war against terrorists:
“The awful events of Sept. 11, 2001, declared a war we were vaguely aware of. … It’s a big thing, this war. It’s a fight between a just regard for human dignity and a malevolent force that defiles an honorable religion by disputing God’s love for every soul on Earth. … And my friends, should our enemies acquire for their arsenal the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons they seek, this war will become a much bigger thing. …
“All of us, despite the differences that enliven our politics, are united in the one big idea that freedom is our birthright and its defense is always our first responsibility. All other responsibilities come second.”
All other responsibilities come second. McCain’s speech, now largely forgotten, drew much attention at the time. He didn’t belittle the domestic needs — creating jobs, improving health services, educating children — that animate millions of caring Americans. He did, though, convince many of those Americans that a coordinated onslaught against U.S. metropolises would wreak damage so incalculable that their domestic priorities could be sidelined for a generation.
What didn’t happen
Constructing a harder America has meant accepting the security constraints of the Patriot Act at home and, overseas, expanding surveillance techniques, killing some foes pre-emptively, and imprisoning others at places like Guantanamo.
What’s remarkable here is how little loss of liberty this decade has cost Americans. Fears of stifled dissent, of FBI agents routinely seizing library records, of Islamophobic laws … Those things didn’t happen. Federal courts consistently have upheld controversial anti-terror tactics employed by the administration of President George W. Bush and continued under President Barack Obama.
Karlyn Bowman, a polling analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, told us Wednesday that her review of public opinion surveys from 2001 until today finds Americans appreciatively giving high marks to the administrations of both Bush and Obama for keeping the nation safe. Last November, 68 percent of respondents told ABC/Washington Post pollsters they want the government to investigate threats even if doing so intrudes on privacy. Bowman and AEI colleague Andrew Rugg concluded after analyzing a decade of such polling:
Americans acknowledge the new sets of challenges imposed by the post-9/11 world. Above all else, they understand the vigilance required to counteract terrorist threats. They are not willing to give the government a blank check, but there is no indication that they think government has gone too far in its response. Ten years of polling on the war on terrorism shows an alert nation prudently wrestling with the demands of a more dangerous world.
Oh — one other measure of a harder America: In May, 80 percent of respondents told NBC/Wall Street Journal pollsters that killing bin Laden, rather than capturing him, was the right thing to do.
Remembering Sept. 10
Many of these more rigorous Americans have come to apply those same values in other realms. It’s not accidental that a nation intent on staying secure internationally now dwells with rising anger on a serious domestic threat: the blown budgets and unmeetable obligations that have created debt crises at every level of government.
And while Americans don’t express less compassion toward others today, Bowman says, they do expect more self-reliance and personal responsibility from their fellow citizens than they may have during our holiday from history. We suspect this helps explain citizens’ rising impatience with public schools that go through the motions but don’t produce more competitive graduates. This has been a bad decade for those who focus primarily on process, a better decade for those who expect results.
Most obvious today among those results: a decade without a successful large-scale attack on American soil. We say that with gratitude to those who have disrupted many terror schemes — and with expectation that this nation’s enemies are plotting more.
Often during the past decade, we’ve ended these discussions of America after 9/11 with a point that needs perpetual restatement:
Ten years out from Sept. 11, there is another date we should memorialize: Sept. 10. Two decades of failure to aggressively confront terror attacks on this nation’s interests concluded that day. It was the last gasp from a long, derelict era of American denial. The next morning, this nation began forging a new resolve.
Americans haven’t retreated from that resolve. Not yet, anyway.
