2008 Polls National Iowa New Hampshire General Election GOP | Dem GOP | Dem GOP | Dem Head-to-Head

---

September 12, 2006

The Immediate Lessons of September 11

By Robert Tracinski

Five years from September 11, 2001, it might be tempting to focus on what has not been done in the War on Terrorism, on the warnings that remain unheeded and the lessons that remain unlearned. It is tempting to focus on our frustration that the war hasn't been fought more quickly, more consistently, more decisively.

But I think an assessment that only takes into account America's failings would produce an overly pessimistic picture. It would be overly pessimistic because it would not take into account the process by which a culture learns--and I mean the process, the time and effort required for a nation's leaders, commentators, and intellectually active citizens to focus their attention on a new issue, gather information, observe events, expose obfuscations, and draw new conclusions.

September 11 caught America unprepared, and not just from a military or intelligence-gathering perspective. It caught America unprepared mentally--unprepared to focus on the threat posed by totalitarian Islam, to take it seriously and grasp its nature, its goals, its roots. Before September 11, Muslim terrorists had attacked American targets, but such attacks were treated as a mere nuisance: every few years, a few Americans would be killed in a far-away Third World country. After all, low-level terrorism fed by the Soviet Union had been a violent sideshow of the Cold War, but only a sideshow. With the collapse of the Soviet threat, most Americans failed to see that the terrorism of the 1990s was not a fading leftover of the Soviet past, but rather the warning of a rising successor to the murderous ideology of Communism.

And so the first lesson of September 11 was the simplest: pay attention. Pay attention to the threat of terrorism, and to the totalitarian Islamic movement that uses terrorism as its distinctive tactic. Pay attention, because this is a matter of life and death.

Only after they were paying attention could Americans learn what this movement is, what it seeks, what are its most dangerous centers of power, and what we need to do to defeat it.

For the past five years, the United States has been immersed in a long lesson in foreign names, places, and words--a lesson in the unfamiliar doctrines of an alien religion and in the machinations of far-off governments. And the task has not just been to absorb and understand the forces that produced the September 11 attacks. America's actions since then have produced reactions from the enemy, which has given us an enormous amount of new information, which we have also had to absorb and understand.

For those who are paying attention and trying to learn--for the culture's best, most honest, most engaged minds--what have they have learned from the events of the past five years?

Given the suddenness with which America's leaders had to grapple with the threat of terrorism, the first lessons they drew were impressive. We could hardly have asked for a better statement of principles than the Bush Doctrine, President Bush's statements in late 2001 and early 2002 that the United States would hold state sponsors responsible for the actions of the terrorist they support, and that the US would act pre-emptively and unilaterally to prevent terrorist regimes from obtaining weapons of mass destruction.

The Bush Doctrine has not been applied consistently, especially in the case of Israel, but the fact that it was stated is an achievement that should not be taken for granted, because its principles had been so vigorously resisted by previous administrations and are still being vigorously resisted by much of the political, intellectual, and foreign policy establishment today.

The principle of holding state sponsors responsible for terrorism was the first new principle embraced by our leaders because it was one that had already been tragically demonstrated by the events of the previous three years. It was our blithe tolerance of al-Qaeda's safe haven in Afghanistan that allowed the terrorist organization to run extensive training camps, to build a large organization, to move funds and terrorists around the world--and to escalate, unopposed, from attacking American embassies in 1998, to attacking American warships in 2000, to attacking American cities in 2001.

The vindication of the policy of targeting state sponsors of terrorism was provided by the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan--an achievement that has made it possible for us to inflict severe damage on al-Qaeda's global operations, to round up many of its top leaders and drive the others into hiding, and to prevent the organization from launching another attack in the United States for five years--not for lack of trying, but for lack of ability to carry out its plans. To the extent that al-Qaeda has not been fully eliminated, it is because we have not removed the organization's last state-tolerated enclaves in Pakistan and Iran.

The fall of the Taliban demonstrated that regimes matter. Allowing an aggressive dictatorship allied with Islamic fanatics to control a country means giving terrorists a base from which to attack us and puts every free nation in to the world in danger.

Having learned that regimes matter and that an evil regime must be "changed"--that is, removed--it is natural that we turned around and applied this lesson to the evil regime we knew best: the Iraqi dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Iraq was next on our list of targets, not because it was the biggest state sponsor of terrorism, nor even because it was the most dangerous, but because it was the adversary that was most familiar to us. We had grappled with Saddam for twelve years, trading bombs and anti-aircraft fire off and on throughout the 1990s, and he was our most active, most pressing piece of unfinished business.

The objection that you commonly hear today is that the war in Iraq had nothing to do with September 11 because Saddam Hussein did not directly support al-Qaeda. But this objection is the sign of a mentality that is not seeking to learn from events or to draw lessons from them. It is a fractured Pragmatist mentality that views each threat to America as a unique and unprecedented event, with no lessons to be drawn from it to apply to other threats.

In the 1990s, this was the mentality that saw each al-Qaeda attack as a law-enforcement matter, to be dealt with by a criminal investigation targeting the specific operatives who staged that attack--rather than by a military campaign targeting the common source of those attacks. This mentality's only reaction to September 11 was to accept that we had to destroy al-Qaeda--but then to deny that the lesson learned from letting al-Qaeda go unopposed year after year could be applied to any other threat in any other country.

What we learned from September 11 was that we do not have the luxury of leaving America's enemies undefeated. If Iraq was America's most urgent piece of unfinished business, what we learned from September 11 is that we had better finish the job.

In Iraq, however, the prospect of toppling a dictatorial regime and replacing it with something better turned out to be a much larger and more complex task than in Afghanistan. This is an experiment from which we gained the most new information in the years following September 11.

---

Sponsored Links

About Us | Contact | Advertise | Privacy Policy         © RealClearPolitics 2006