Having lived through MAD, I still can't believe this century got off to a start so bent out of shape over mere terrorism.
(upon reflection, having also lived through the pandemic, I can believe it)
(upon reflection, having also lived through the pandemic, I can believe it)
9/11 was an attack on the greatest symbols of American power on American soil. Suffice to say, Americans are not accustomed to that and they went mad with rage and fear. Cue a generation of death, destruction, and the reshaping of the world as America worked through that trauma.
It wasn’t just mere terrorism but also the psychological result of American strategic isolation.
9/11 was the most successful terrorist attack in modern history. We are still running scared.
Not as compared to 9/11 through ~2017. America has largely returned to the geopolitical indifference it had in the 1990s but with much greater exhaustion for direct foreign military intervention and cynicism about strategic alliances.
In 2000, if you were to ask someone what building represented the success of the US, I'd bet the majority would say Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, or Sears Tower. Maybe that answer would be different for New Yorkers though, idk.
The psychology that should be noted was the government and media whipping the populace into a psychotic frenzy which made us willing to murder a quarter million people in a country that had nothing to do with the attack. The fact that this isn't brought up every time 9/11 is mentioned is a travesty.
We, as a civilization, are riding the razors edge of stability. The amount of energy required to destabilize the system, when applied in just the right way, is shockingly small.
This is massively overstating the impact on the west, and America specifically. Obviously it massively disrupted life and civilization in the Middle East and elsewhere, and it lead to the death of 10s of 1000s of military personnel and degraded civil liberties in America and elsewhere. But it had no substantial impact on “civilization” in the west.
See also, airport security theatre.
The WTC clearly represents American economic might, but the Pentagon was attacked also and that represents American military power. The White House narrowly avoided being hit. Additionally, people don’t have to consciously understand what things symbolize for that to be make an impact on them. Plus, it wasn’t just a message to Americans but to the world, especially the Muslim world, and the WTC had been unsuccessfully attacked 8 years previously so it was a symbol of failure for them. Not afterwards!
It's one thing to see the body bags of soldiers coming back. It's another to see death and destruction in your own city.
Cue a generation of death, destruction, and the reshaping of the world as America co-opted the trauma to start a generation of unjustifiable wars and massively reduce civil liberties.
Not to mention it really created an “us vs. them” environment in the American homeland which is still ever present if not getting worse.
I think Bin Laden was counting on “death by a thousand cuts” aka creeping normality and I believe that was largely successful. Americans seem to have partly turned on each other over political differences. People now have an even larger distrust of the institutions in this country. Empathy seems to have taken a sideline. I’ve seen families broken up and almost experienced it myself. People now spend so much time online in their echo chambers and sometimes refuse to even converse with “the other side”. This goes both ways.
With all of this happening I think of this part of Lincoln’s Lyceum Address:
“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
Shining Path in Peru is a great example. It doesn't take many bombings (that don't even kill people) to bring a system nearly to a halt.
It's one reason why Singapore has very strict security rules targeting terrorism. Not because of mass casualties, but because of the instability it would bring, dragging down the economy, creating social unrest.
Terrorists aren't stupid. They know terror works.
It's still going on, and things are more unstable with Russia and the US Republicans opposed to treaties or disarmament and embracing aggression and violence on principle, and China adding a third nuclear force to balance.
that would be because nukes are completely useless against anything assymetrical
As nice and safe the terrorists were as an enemy, everybody knew that it won't last long. It just wasn't convincing and terrorists, apart from few events, were pretty much worthless.
So US naturally picked next solid enemy, China for their next hopefully long and prosperous cold war.
Having an enemy is super important for US politics, their industry and social structure. It gives them excuses for protectionism. It gives them ability to have an alternative to increasingly impoverished civilian customers when it comes to stimulating innovation and industrial growth. It allowes them to give jobs to people that in purely civilian economy wouls just raise unemployment and unrest. All the culture of US is soaked in hero/villain dynamics that consolidates society and prevents from asking too many questions in the presence of a villain.
The problem now is that US is starting to drop the ball. World caught up with their advantage of being the only major economy not damaged by WWII. Unfortunately the current US enemy is on more capable side. So this time, maybe for the first time, the US is in the real danger. Maybe isolationist tendencies of Trump and his fans are not such a bad thing. Maybe US should go back to pre-wwii state. Times when US could credibly pretend they are on top of things, not just bit ahead of the pack, are pretty much over.
And US force-projection has few defences against the kind of subversion of key figures that Putin has decided to specialise in.
The US will continue in some form. But the post-Enlightenment liberal/rationalist/progressive current in the US and Europe is in deadly danger.
Many countries with local ambitions smell blood in the water and they start to pop up their heads. Putin is the largest one, but there are so many recently. US has pretty much no hopes of maintaining control over it all. It's not even trying. It divested from Ukraine, tentatively invested in Israel, pretty much ignoring everything else.
Unlike a state attacking another state, pinning down where these people were getting their orders from was difficult. Considering what your age must be, I'm surprised you struggle to understand the difference between an openly militarized nation versus terrorist cells that could be anywhere and anybody. There's no coordinates to punch into a MAD system when it comes to terrorists.
If it was so easy, years wouldn't have been spent searching for the likes of Bin Laden.
Edit:
he U.S. post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan have taken a tremendous human toll on those countries. As of September 2021, an estimated 432,093 civilians in these countries have died violent deaths as a result of the wars
144 times as many CIVILIANS were killed by the US.
It also isn't about whether it is "nothing" compared to what is happening elsewhere, the topic at hand is the USA. The rest of the world isn't what is being discussed.
There were weaknesses in the US national security threat model. It wasn't a major consideration that someone would hijack a plane and fly it into NYC, the major assumption was that an attack would come from another nation, and it would be military, and it would be detected as hostile in aerospace. Guise of a civilian aircraft? Yeah, that was a gaping hole.
Come on, the fucking Pentagon had a plane flown into it on the same day.
It's one thing for gov to get hacked by teens, it's another thing to have a terrorist org do all that in the space of a few hours.
Sure, the same can be said about the handful of people in the US: The president, the Secretary of Defense / Department of "Defense"
But instead of fixing a few gaps and taking out a few leaders per month indefinitely, the US allowed itself to be distracted massively for decades, surely way beyond what the terrorists could have dreamed of. It was basically first prize for Osama. I’m not sure what the full count of the US economic and social losses are but it’s probably indescribable. Someone waved a red flag and Bush couldn’t help himself.
The smart move would have been to rise above it. You’re the greatest nation on earth. You don’t get distracted by a few terrorists, you get on with changing the world.
I understand your sentiment, but I disagree, "you get on with changing the world", which should include preserving that which already exists.
People forget about the concurrent attack on the Pentagon on 9/11. If all that can happen in the space of less than an hour, that was not a threat to be ignored, and more would have followed had something not been done.
You're also conflating improving national security with boots-on-the-ground searching for supposed WMDs in another country. The two things are not the same in any way. Your argument is total "whataboutery".
If you have holes in national security that allowed something like 9/11 to happen, including the attack on the Pentagon on that same morning, you do something to prevent the likes of it, or worse, from happening again. You can't even argue against that.
You got me.
> whataboutery
Since we’re slinging terms around: false dichotomy.
I’m not arguing that they should have ignored it. Fix the specific issues without creating more, broader, deeper issues. The approach used wasted massive resources of all kinds - economic, social, lives, focus. There were infinitely better outcomes that could have been achieved at lower overall cost. 8 trillion is a lot of misplaced focus spent in deserts far away.
Don’t mix up the “what” with “how”. Fix the problem, but not stupidly.
And the "security weaknesses" were mostly in the White House.
https://www.politico.eu/article/attacks-will-be-spectacular-...
"the result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.. i mean of Ukraine... heh.. Iraq too"
Uh, the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were sanctioned by the Congress. Overwhelmingly. Then the people who started them were replaced, thrice, giving the problem fresh sets of eyes. Comparing W. Bush et al to Putin is ridiculous on many levels, even if the wars per se share characteristics. (Most potently, in being massive blunders.)
Although I wouldn't compare them directly. They are very different personalities, have different motives, etc
In both cases, the war had massive support in its domestic population, patriotism clichés were used to drum up support etc. It doesn't matter if there is a better separation of power in theory in this case, since it didn't prevent half a million to a million people from dying due to the Iraq war. It only matters for Americans so that they can feel better about their institutions
Yes, war is bad. That doesn’t mean all wars are the same, nor that nothing can be learned from them. Comparing the checks and balances on the Kremlin with those on the American President is wrong; it creates a world model which won’t make good predictions.
So my point is that at the end of the day, for the people on the receiving end of those wars, they don't really see the difference and aren't protected by an American style system. If anything, it gives the veneer of "good intentions", whereas the Russian Kremlin doesn't. So it makes stuff like Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, wars based on lies etc go unpunished. No one sanctions the US for example.