The Lessons of 9/11

October 24, 2006

            The recent election and our struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq can perhaps lead to one positive outcome. Perhaps now we are ready to have a serious conversation about the real lessons of 9/11. Perhaps now one can offer alternatives to the Bush administration without being dismissed as ‘soft on terrorism’ or ‘undermining the troops’ or ‘aiding the enemy.’

This conversation is long overdue and too important to avoid. It should start with the admission that we learned the wrong lessons from 9/11. We reacted with a few simple assumptions that do not match the complex realities of the contemporary world.   

            Wrong Lesson #1: We are in a fight between good and evil. This simple dichotomy has not only been a rhetorical device to generate domestic support but also a basic policy assumption. We have said that others are either with us or with the terrorists. We have said that the terrorists hate us because of our freedoms. We have identified Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an ‘axis of evil.’ We have said that the only way to deal with evil is to eradicate it.

But the world is more complicated than this. Who is ‘good’ and who is ‘evil’ in Iraq when Muqtada al Sadr is in the Iraqi governing coalition? Is the majority of the world who refused to help us in Iraq really ‘evil’? Is the Pakistani military dictatorship ‘good’ because they are ostensibly helping us? Is it ‘good’ to torture detainees?

We should have learned that terrorism is a complicated political threat. We should have learned that terrorists have a coherent ideology and real political grievances. We should have learned that they hate us for our actions (our support for Israel and secular monarchs, our military bases in their holy land, the influence of Western culture, etc.). We should have learned that our policies need to undermine rather than fuel their radical ideology.

Wrong Lesson #2: Our military can keep us safe. We can fight terrorism by invading countries that provide safe haven for them (Afghanistan). We can even fight terrorism by invading countries that we think have weapons of mass destruction and we think have ties to terrorists (Iraq).

            The events of 9/11 should have taught us that this is false. We need to come to grips with the irony that the most powerful military country in the history of the world cannot solely rely on that military to protect its citizens. This is a scary lesson to unlearn. It goes against our cultural self-understanding as an independent, can-do nation. It means we have to rely on others for our own security.

            But the reality of the contemporary world is that military power alone does not lead to security. If 9/11 did not teach us this, then our failures in Afghanistan and Iraq definitely should. Military capability cannot provide security against today’s major threats – terrorism, weapons proliferation, economic instability, environmental collapse, disease, migration, etc. Only political cooperation with others can. How else to explain the fact that the Baker-Hamilton report advocates talks with Iran to help stabilize Iraq? We even need help from an “axis of evil” member!

            Wrong lesson #3: Our democratic institutions have universal appeal. We presumed that we could fight terrorism with democracy. We invade a country, establish a democratic system, the entire region follows suit, and the democratic freedoms enjoyed by all would snuff out terrorist ideology.

            But all recent elections have strengthened radical Islamist movements (Hamas in Palestine, Ahmadinejad in Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and even the Iraqi elections). And how well would Hezbollah do in Lebanon after the recent military stalemate with Israel? The scary part of these elections is that many regular people in the Middle East seem to have the same grievances against us as the terrorists.

            Unlearning these lessons opens new ways to fight terrorism. We need to politically cooperate with other countries to apprehend violent terrorists. And we need to discredit radical Islamic ideology with regular people in the Middle East. We cannot do this with military power and ballot boxes in order to transform them into a mirror image of ourselves. This will only confirm radical Islamic ideology and perpetuate the violence against us.