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Everyone is engaging in acts of reflection and remembrance this weekend to mark the 10 years since September, 11. For some, that has inspired a lot of handwringing, a recognition that the past decade has not been a good one for the United States, neither economically nor spiritually. Others have pointed out how the past ten years have in large part been an elaborate and almost grotesque exercise in denial and distraction—we obsessed over a small band of stateless, reactionary, ideological extremists while a greater threat loomed ever closer. Many have lamented how in significant ways, 9/11 never really ended at all.
The Washington Post‘s editorial board, on the other hand, has taken the opportunity to engage in a rather poorly-veiled and very weakly-argued defense of most of our government’s most controversial actions in response to the tragedy, all of which the Post itself heartily endorsed. In case you had any doubts, the piece makes it very clear that, at the very least, these men and women learned nothing:
ON THE 10TH anniversary of al-Qaeda’s attack on New York and Washington, the conventional wisdom seems to be evolving from “We will be hit again” to “Osama bin Laden won by provoking us into a decade of overreaction.”
The feeling is understandable but incorrect, and it would be dangerous if it took hold. Yes, the nation made big mistakes over the past decade. When has America ever geared up without excess and error? But the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon alerted Americans to genuine dangers that only a relative few had previously noticed. We have lived safely for the decade since not because we misread those dangers but because we responded to them in a manner in which, on balance, Americans can take pride.
The overreaction argument holds that al-Qaeda goaded the nation to curtail civil liberties and construct a monstrous homeland security apparatus while bungling into adventures abroad that birthed new enemies, sapped the American economy and distracted the nation from bigger problems. There is some truth to each element of the critique. The nation stained itself with its treatment of foreign detainees and particularly its use of interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, that had long been recognized as torture. By refusing to raise taxes to face the new reality, it endangered its fiscal health. The United States went to war in Iraq on the basis of faulty intelligence and was arrogantly ill-prepared for the responsibilities of occupation once Saddam Hussein fell. After initial successes in Afghanistan, it paid insufficient attention as the Taliban attempted a comeback. There’s a danger now that the nation will, once again, withdraw too soon from the challenges.
But al-Qaeda was a well-organized, capable organization intent on causing America mortal harm. It embodied an ideology that repelled most Muslims but was nonetheless attractive enough to permit continuous recruitment. And it was operating in an era when new technologies — nuclear, biological, chemical and cyber — allow small numbers of people to envision doing enormous harm to advanced and open democracies.
Well, I’ll tell you, it took nearly 10 years, but now I find such hysterical, disproportionate, and thickheaded descriptions of the latest Great Enemy, al Qaeda, to be quite persuasive indeed. After all, it was an ideology that, in a world with billions of Muslims, was potent enough to “attract enough to permit continuous recruitment.” Bear in mind that, in Afghanistan, where we are fighting a war against this titanic evil that The Washington Post fervently urges us never to end, the government itself estimates there to be well below 50 al Qaeda members. Yes, these dozens of fanatics are a testament to how grave and epoch-defining is the threat of al Qaeda.
And in response to charges that the United States has, in its shirking of habeas corpus, international treaties and norms (which it once championed) against torture, laws against surveillance, and countless other measures that limit what government may be able to do to us in the name of our own security, the Post reminds us that, well, y’know, it could’ve been worse:
There was in fact no large-scale assault on personal freedoms — no equivalent to the Supreme Court-sanctioned roundup of Japanese Americans, no repeat of the Red Scare infringements on freedom of speech and association. The Patriot Act enabled a modest, mostly court-supervised expansion of law enforcement vigilance. When there were excesses in the earliest, most panicked years, there was self-correction, with pushes from within the system (the Justice Department inspector general, for example), from members of Congress of both parties and from unfettered media and public interest groups. There have been hateful acts against Muslim Americans, but overall Americans accepted President Bush’s early insistence that the U.S. war was not against Islam. And though it took too long, Congress and a new administration eventually made clear that torture is not acceptable.
There was never any doubt, however, whether or not torture was “acceptable”; I’d remind the Post that the sickening, lie-ridden, and bad faith discussion we had in the past decade was over whether or not waterboarding was itself torture to begin with. For the time being, we have a President who says it is. But on this issue, as is the case with so many others, he does not stan in agreement with the vast majority of his partners on the other side of the aisle. Just ask Marc Thiessen, currently an op-ed contributor to The Washington Post.
It goes on, of course. You’re welcome to click over and read the whole thing—the artless conflation of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan with the Arab Spring is a particularly inspired bit of sophistry—but I promise you it’s nothing you haven’t confronted innumerable times before. Tomorrow will be 9/11/2011 for most of us, but for The Washington Post, it’s always 9/12/2001 and there always remains much more fighting left to be done.