The Washington Post: “How 9/11 changed us”

The literature of 9/11 also considers Osama bin Laden’s varied aspirations for the attacks and his shifting visions of that aftermath. He originally imagined America as weak and easily panicked, retreating from the world — in particular from the Middle East — as soon as its troops began dying. But bin Laden also came to grasp, perhaps self-servingly, the benefits of luring Washington into imperial overreach, of bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy, as he put it in 2004, through endless military expansionism, thus beating back its global sway and undermining its internal unity. We anticipate a black future for America, bin Laden told ABC News more than three years before the 9/11 attacks. Instead of remaining United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America.

Bin Laden did not win the war of ideas. But neither did we. To an unnerving degree, the United States moved toward the enemy’s fantasies of what it might become — a nation divided in its sense of itself, exposed in its moral and political compromises, conflicted over wars it did not want but would not end. When President George W. Bush addressed the nation from the Oval Office on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, he asserted that America was attacked because it is the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world, and no one will keep that light from shining. Bush was correct; al-Qaeda could not dim the promise of America. Only we could do that to ourselves.

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Clarke’s conclusion is simple, and it highlights America’s we-know-better swagger, a national trait that often masquerades as courage or wisdom. America, alas, seems only to respond well to disasters, to be undistracted by warnings, he writes. Our country seems unable to do all that must be done until there has been some awful calamity.

The problem with responding only to calamity is that underestimation is usually replaced by overreaction. And we tell ourselves it is the right thing, maybe the only thing, to do.

Carlos Lozada

Gripping essay about America’s reaction to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, describing the failures of intelligence agencies and successive administrations to take the threat seriously and act towards preventing it, but other failings of American society as well, down to deregulation and unrestricted lobbying causing numerous deaths in the World Trade Center because people did not have enough space to evacuate.

Illustrations by Patrik Svensson

Had the World Trade Center, built in the late 1960s and early 1970s, been erected according to the city building code in effect since 1938, Dwyer and Flynn explain, “it is likely that a very different world trade center would have been built.” Instead, it was constructed according to a new code that the real estate industry had avidly promoted, a code that made it cheaper and more lucrative to build and own skyscrapers. It increased the floor space available for rent… by cutting back on the areas that had been devoted, under the earlier law, to evacuation and exit, the authors write. The result: Getting everybody out on 9/11 was virtually impossible.

Under the new rules, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was able to rent three-quarters of each floor of the World Trade Center, Dwyer and Flynn report, a 21 percent increase over the yield of older skyscrapers. The cost was dear. Some 1,000 people inside the North Tower who initially survived the impact of American Airlines Flight 11 could not reach an open staircase. Their fate was sealed nearly four decades earlier, when the stairways were clustered in the core of the building, and fire stairs were eliminated as a wasteful use of valuable space. (The authors write that building code reform hardly makes for gripping drama, an aside as modest as it is inaccurate.) The towers embodied the power of American capitalism, but their design embodied the folly of American greed. On that day, both conditions proved fatal.

The graver issue is that many of these deficiencies are still present today, perhaps even exacerbated. They were apparent in the delayed and wavering US response to the pandemic, which has come to prioritize business interests over health concerns, and in the rise of threats to citizens of Asian descent in its early days. They are now manifesting in the overreactions and intransigence around the Russian war in Ukraine, where individual Russians are blamed for the invasion and the mere suggestion of negotiations is instantly derided as appeasement and weakness. The dynamics of ‘forever war’ are progressively shaping relations with China, where a zero-sum mentality is increasingly dominating policy and U.S. politicians are becoming so focused on countering China that they risk losing sight of the affirmative interests and values that should underpin U.S. strategy.