It was the most perfect September morning that Washington could serve up: Bright, sunny, just enough chill in the air to wash away the summer’s humidity. I wasn’t eager to spend the next few hours in a windowless basement for my intel briefing, and I wouldn’t have to: The morning bottleneck at my office was all outgoing. I asked the guard what was happening, and he pointed to a pillar of smoke in the southwest sky. From what had, until about 10 minutes ago, been the exterior wall of the Pentagon.
Senators and staffers alike packed into any restaurant with a TV, to watch footage of planes crashing into the World Trade Centre. Only much later would we learn that we’d been the bullseye of the fourth plane, which passengers and crew intervened with to force it to crash in Pennsylvania. Its target had been the Capitol building itself, and the SCIF in which my briefing was scheduled was located directly beneath the rotunda.
Commentators would speak about the confusion of that morning, but at the time it was all quite clear: As soon as the second plane struck the South Tower at 9.03 am, there was no doubt that this was a terrorist attack. And from that fact, everything else was obvious: We had been struck by Al Qaeda, and the Bush Administration would use this as a pretext to invade Iraq.
I was the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer responsible for Afghanistan and counter-terrorism, so perhaps I had greater clarity than some of my colleagues. But this was not a difficult call: There was no other terrorist group with both the capability and the intent to stage such an operation. Al Qaeda had no ties whatsoever to Iraq, but the Administration had spent the past nine months openly beating its war drum. Bush would certainly use this unrelated atrocity as an excuse to do what he already intended.
Which was, of course, exactly how it turned out. Al Qaeda inflicted the greatest damage on America by any foreign adversary since Imperial Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. And in response, America inflicted the greatest damage on itself since the Civil War. We still haven’t recovered from our response to 9/11 — and we’re now replicating our worst mistakes. Some of our errors were those of law. We gave the government vast new powers to surveil and detain anyone. We sacrificed our core values by reintroducing torture as an accepted practice for military detainees. We created the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, and we turned neighbourhood cops into up-armoured shock-troops kitted out for urban combat.
But the greatest errors were those of policy: We launched two decades-long wars, at the cost of trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. The overwhelming mass of the casualties were Iraqis and Afghans, but over twice as many Americans died in these futile wars as all those killed by Osama bin Laden.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not the same. Not even the most fervent war-hawk wanted to invade Afghanistan, but there seemed to be little alternative; I was involved with these deliberations, and I share in whatever blame must be apportioned. Even now, with the benefit of hindsight, I don’t have a good answer for the question of how we should have handled Afghanistan. A 20-year occupation was definitely the wrong response, but it was a devil’s dilemma that nobody sought out.
Iraq, however, was purely a war of choice. We marched in with our eyes wide open. Anyone who didn’t know it would be a debacle was simply refusing to see.
Our current war on Iran is even more foolhardy than our invasion of Iraq. It has not (at least yet) resulted in the same level of bloodshed, because we have not (at least yet) introduced ground troops. But the Iraq fiasco was debated for nearly two years beforehand, and authorised by Congress — as is required by the Constitution. It had clear objectives, and achieved the most immediate of them (the removal of Saddam Hussein, and imposition of a regime acceptable to the US). The war on Iran was launched purely on the whim of a feckless president, with no strategic planning, and a constantly changing set of war aims that could never be achieved. This war was lost from the moment the first Tomahawk was fired.
Adversity can be a superb teacher. But the greatest disaster of recent American history has taught us nothing. Are we safer than we were on September 10, 2001? Maybe safer from the specific terrorist menace that killed 2,977 of us. But safer from the huge range of other dangers that jeopardise the other 361 million? Pick your peril: Disease, climate change, mass impoverishment, AI apocalypse — what could that mountain of money and all those sacrificed lives have accomplished if devoted to any of the hazards that threaten Americans every day?
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Americans briefly came together in unity. There were exceptions, of course: The scapegoating of Muslims (or anyone mistaken for them), outbursts of misdirected anger, a pervading frustration at being shown that our nation was more vulnerable than we wished to know. But the overwhelming sentiment was one of solidarity. Americans of all political stripes felt a sense of kinship and community that we hadn’t often experienced before, and certainly haven’t in more recent times.
My children will never know the less embattled America that existed before 9/11. They’ll never enter an airport or government building without a prison-style security screening, and maybe a bit of extra scrutiny because of their South Asian complexion. Is the marginal gain in safety from one (rather rare) threat worth the loss of so much else? Definitely not to me. But I hope my kids can someday experience the America that existed in the weeks after the attack. If we can recapture some of the social comradeship that we found in the depths of our worst tragedy, perhaps we’ll have learned a lesson from 9/11 after all.
Blank is author of Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana Through India and Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity Among the Daudi Bohras
Smoke billows from one of the towers of the World Trade Center as flames and debris explode from the second tower, Sept. 11, 2001 (Image: AP). 
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