Twenty Years On...

The run-up to the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks has given me plenty of cause for reflection, a lot of which was made more painful by the calamitous withdraw from Afghanistan. There are an endless number of commentaries, podcasts, editorials, to be read marking the 20th anniversary. It's a period of time that will garner analysis and (bitter) debate for decades to come. There's plenty I could offer in terms of misgivings, lessons learned, failures, turning points, and what it all means for the future. It would be a very long post and, unfortunately, repeat a lot of the conflicting views being expressed already. 

Well Worth A Visit

Instead, I thought I'd try a short post that was a bit more personal, albeit probably still full of conflicting sentiment. Indeed, it's hard not to reflect on the last two decades and not be conflicted. It's a source of conflict that began on a morning in September that was exactly as beautiful as everyone says it was.

The Imperial Capital

In the fall of 2001, I was living in the heart of Washington, D.C. in an overpriced apartment just off Scott Circle (15th and Rhode Island, to be exact). But, what I paid for in rent was more than made up for in terms of walkable conveniences. I also simply loved Washington. Still do. The city is like a smorgasbord for policy junkies. It eats, sleeps, and breathes politics, 24/7. I also love the grandeur of the place. Indeed, during the short walk west from my apartment to SAIS/Johns Hopkins where I was studying, you have to go around Scott Circle which straddles 16th Street which you can look down and see all the way to the White House. 

Name Changed for a Reason

D.C. has more than its fair share of grit, poverty and violence. I've read numerous commentaries
unfavourably comparing D.C. to other world capitals like Paris, London, or Berlin. I've visited the others, and I see the point. Yet, there's a sterility, an unreality, even antiseptic quality to those capitals that leaves me wanting. D.C. has a unique grandeur and charm, albeit one that's changing fast. The I-95 corridor from Boston in the north to Washington in the south is one of the busiest, most densely populated areas of the United States. For decades, Washington retained its unique character as a national capital, but also a "southern" city. However, even in my relatively brief tenure living there, the entire area around D.C. was exploding, a magnate for high tech, government contractors, and anyone armed with a university education looking to influence policy. As government grew, so did the city. In my time there, leviathan was already on the march and the city was changing rapidly. 

When I took up residence off Scott Circle, some of the neighbourhoods to the east of me looked much as
they did after riots burned parts of the city in the late 1960s. The homeless were in evidence, as were scores of migrant workers who gathered in the parking lot behind my building hoping to snag a day's work in construction (the Immigration and Naturalization Service van was never far away). By the time I left, all of that was gone, replaced by million dollar renovations to brownstones, glass condominiums and, of course, a Whole Foods Market. My own building began renovating some of its suites into furnished units that would then be leased to corporations so they could send their lobbyists on lower-cost, medium-term missions to D.C. Indeed, rent for my tiny apartment doubled in my time there (a strong incentive to graduate and move on). 

Sadly, all of that gentrification hasn't been good for many long-time residents of the city. As people from all over the country and around the world descended on D.C., many of the (often poor and black) local residents were being pushed closer to the fringes of the city in search of affordable living. Meanwhile, I'm not sure all of the glass and concrete that has been erected in the last 20yrs has improved things. Parts of D.C. now have a modern sterility to them that, to me at least, are a reminder of the growth of government since 9/11. The occupants of those cookie-cutter glass buildings are law-firms, lobbyists, consultants, and contractors who have descended on the Imperial Capital to feed at the tax-payer trough. That might not be entirely fair, but...

Reading the Paper....

The morning of September 11, 2001, I was reading about the arcane, but interesting, negotiations on Capitol Hill over the federal budget. As I recall, that was the front page story. My Washington Post was one of the small necessities I allowed myself while a PhD student at SAIS/Johns Hopkins. Since I was spending a growing share of the money I did have on rent, I decided a TV would be a distracting expense I could live with out. Sometime just before 10am, I got a call from my sister in Salt Lake City. It was odd to hear from her at that hour of the day and on a Tuesday. She asked if I was okay? Sure, I told her. Then she asked if I knew what was going on? No, I guess I didn't.

American 77

Her call was prompted by the crash of American Airlines 77 into the Pentagon. From the camera angles on her television, she wondered how close the crash had been to where I worked. Not close, but close enough. I had no idea what was happening, but quickly flipped on my radio to discover what had already happened in New York City and what was unfolding in D.C. After saying goodbye, I ran over to SAIS where I had a previously scheduled meeting with a professor. There was total chaos in the streets. Traffic jams. People exiting the city center on foot. At SAIS, dozens of students sat gobsmacked at what they were watching on the big screen TV in the main auditorium. I was supposed to meet my professor, Fred Holborn, to talk about a term paper I was writing for his class. Holborn was a rumpled, curmudgeonly professor out central casting, including an office piled so high with what seemed like decades worth of newspapers that there was nowhere for me to sit. In the middle of it all, Holborn had a small black and white television tuned to the coverage. He invited me in to sit on a pile of newspapers and we watched for the next hour or so as each of the towers in New York collapsed and news of United 93 came in. 

I don't remember saying much while we were watching, but no progress on my term paper was made. 

The Aftermath....

It's hard to capture or describe the fear that gripped D.C. in the weeks and months that followed. The entire city felt as though it was under siege by an invading army. For weeks on an almost daily basis, there would be breathless reporting about planes that had returned to the gate or forced to land because of a threat warning of some kind. Most turned out to be false alarms, but a few were real, including the infamous "shoe bomber" Richard Reid who tried to blow up explosives in his shoes on a December 2001 flight from Paris to Miami. There were also the letters full of anthrax sent to several Members of Congress just a week after 9/11; an event still shrouded in some mystery. Then there were rumours of a repeat of the apartment explosions in Moscow in 1999 where Chechen rebels packed several apartments full of explosives, killing hundreds. I distinctly recall getting a notice from the FBI in my mailbox warning residents to be on the look-out for suspicious activity along these lines among my neighbours; specifically those who might be of vaguely Middle Eastern origin. Good grief.

1600 Pennsylvania in 2001

With every new threat, real or imagined, D.C. would go into several days of arbitrary panic. Large sections of downtown D.C. would be cordoned off, all vehicle traffic prevented from getting anywhere near government buildings or institutions like the IMF and World Bank. The fear was an Oklahoma City-style truck bomb. Pennsylvania Avenue, right in front of the White House, had already been closed off since 1995 because of that event. The aftermath of 9/11 hardened (albeit in some instances also beautified) the area around the White House.

1600 Pennsylvania Today

Although I was a student, I had the chance to also hold a job in an office very close to the White House. Our building had its fresh-air intakes re-routed to thwart weaponized pathogens from being tossed in. Windows were replaced with fortified glass aimed at minimizing damage from a bomb blast. And, outside, D.C.'s already visible police presence grew by leaps and bounds, augmented by the non-stop wail of sirens. 

And then there were the airports. It took a while for airports to sputter back to life after the closure of US airspace on 9/11. And when they did, it was a surreal, painful, and chaotic experience. It was a constantly changing landscape of security procedures. Every time there was a new threat, there would be changes. Richard Reid tries to blow up his shoes? Everyone off with their shoe
s in security. Plot to blow up airplanes over the Atlantic by mixing small amounts of chemicals? No more outside bottles on planes. What about explosives packed in your underwear? Full body scanners at security.

Too Close for Comfort

But the most bizarre flying experience in the country was to go through Reagan National Airport just across the Potomac River from D.C. Because of it's proximity to very sensitive parts of the federal government, and a flight path to the runway that gave spectacular views of the heart of the city but also presented obvious concerns, Reagan National remained closed for three weeks after the attacks; and nearly didn't reopen at all. When it did reopen, flying into or out of it was a tension-filled event. You were not allowed to stand for the final half-hour of descent in or the first half-hour of departure out. If you flew on Air Canada, still the only foreign carrier allowed to use Reagan National, it was for a while only to Toronto. For years after 9/11, flights to Reagan National were different than every other transborder flight, starting with the gate being a 20min walk from the main U.S. Customs preclearance area; a strangely isolated area of the airport. There was the main security checkpoint prior to entering U.S. Customs, but then another to be navigated at the end of your 20min walk to the boarding area.

Airport security still fascinates every time I travel. Things have generally become a little more predictable and we've adjusted, but it still fascinates every time some new gizmo is rolled out to automate the experience of being questioned and herded around like cattle until you squeeze yourself onto the plane and fight your stressed fellow passengers for overhead bin space.

Leviathan...

Connected to these personal observations are a couple that are more scholastic and linked to things I've written about academically. The past 20yrs have had far reaching consequences domestically and abroad. One interest of mine has been domestic, where the attacks prompted the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in late 2002. It was the largest reorganization of the U.S. government since the creation of the national security structures just after World War II. DHS is now a behemoth of 240,000 employees and a $52 billion budget with responsibility for everything a host of issues related to domestic security. In North America, DHS has overseen the hardening and militarization of borders with Canada and Mexico. Indeed, I don't think the debate over border walls in recent years would have gotten the traction is has in the U.S. had it not been for 9/11.

There was a brief period between 2005 and 2009 when North America's leadership had a chance to stave off the worst effects of DHS's growth on the border; the ill-fated Security and Prosperity Partnership. That turned out to be an abject failure, a failure to re-envision North America's borders, restore them to the porous track they were on for the crossing of legitimate people, cargo, and finance. Instead, the precedent set on 9/11 for thinking about North America's borders as points of interdiction has remained. Indeed, the closure of North America's borders on 9/11 made it easier to think about closing them again during the pandemic. And, as we discovered after 9/11, closing borders is much easier to do than setting the terms of reopening them.

However, in my view, one of the most important consequences of 9/11 was rhetorical. The binaries of "us versus them", "good versus evil", "freedom versus tyranny", "liberalism versus fanaticism", have not served us well. While I recognize these rhetorical devices play well in speeches, I'm certain they don't lend themselves to good policy-making. Instead, the sorts of binaries that lead to soaring speech-making full of absolutes and moral stances have also exacerbated the polarization in our politics. Indeed, I've read several reviews of the last 20yrs recently that focus on how 9/11 accelerated the march toward the bitter politics we see today; the Clinton Impeachment (1998-1999), invasion of Afghanistan (2001), invasion of Iraq (2003), election of Barack Obama (2008), Financial Crisis (2008-2011?), advent of the Tea Party (2010), election of Donald Trump (2016), etc. 

Axis of Evil Speech

We've descended into waring camps whose main goal seems to be making enough people on their side angry that they'll come out to the polls and throw the incumbents to the curb. 

What concerns me now is that the polarizing binaries that evolved after 9/11 remain with us as we try and come to terms with the global pandemic. I know that sounds like I am blurring lines between two different things. In part, yes. Yet, I see lots of parallels between what we're dealing with in the pandemic and the ways in which we responded to 9/11; fear badly distorted our sense of risk, fear also prompted/allowed government to expand, and we oversimplified our responses to very complex problems. 

Our rhetorical response to the pandemic has been as troubling as it was to 9/11. Binaries are back, starting with the us versus them rhetoric surrounding China's role in the pandemic's origins. As the pandemic has dragged on, we've seen the expanded use of unhelpful rhetoric such as vaxxed versus unvaxxed, or that it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated. I get everyone's frustration, but scapegoating the unvaxxed is not a helpful way to move us forward. Moreover, the rhetoric about the unvaxxed has become a kind of shorthand for Trump, anti-vaxx, QAnon conspiracy nuts. Those people exist. But the unvaccinated are a more diverse group than this, and includes the poor and visible minorities with well-founded historical suspicions of the medical establishment. 

The anger I have seen expressed toward the "unvaxxed" on platforms like Twitter or Facebook is breathtaking. The willingness of some to head down an autocratic road to combat a complicated set of problems related to Covid-19 is depressing. 

Fear, frustration, and a strong sense of helplessness resulted in some disastrous policy decisions at home and abroad after 9/11. I'm not sure how many of the decisions that facilitated the rapid expansion of government have made us "safer." Now, as then, governments were under a lot of pressure to take action to alleviate our fears, even when the actions didn't seem to directly address the problem. In too many ways, I think we're making some of the same mistakes with the pandemic; public anxiety pushing governments into blunt, poorly calibrated actions that are as much about appearance as action, and, of course, the polarization that is both cause and byproduct of it all. 

Lessons Learned?

I don't have any to offer. I'm still grappling with it all. 20yrs of the war on terror have been exhausting. Mix in a financial crisis, some populist politics, and a pandemic and, well, it's hard to get much perspective. I have significant misgivings about what's unfolded, where we are, and where we might be going. The tentacles extending from 9/11 go in so many different directions that they're hard to grapple with. My hope is that continuing to write about it all here and elsewhere will help us understand the scope of what the past 20yrs have wrought.