Have We Put 9/11 Behind Us?

Posted by Enrique on 09.11.2009

Too soon?



Happy Patriot Day, dear readers. As you are no doubt aware, today is the eighth anniversary of the terrorist attacks that changed America forever for a few years. Those of us who were alive that day will never forget the feelings of despair and powerlessness we experienced as we watched the footage of the twin towers collapse. Needless to say, anyone who knew someone who perished in the terrorist attacks that day experienced a loss few of us are able to comprehend. It is not a day any American will recall with fondness.

With each successive anniversary, the tragedy of that day grows more distant, and expressions of grief become more pro forma. Surely it must still be a powerfully sad day for New Yorkers, for whom it was a local event. But eight years on, national remembrances of 9/11 are fairly understated. President Barack Obama wrote an muted op-ed in the New York Daily News about how "today we are all New Yorkers," which is little more than a brief tribute to the victims with a little rah-rah about the Afghan war thrown in. The future of the Republican Party, Sarah Palin, issued a brief statement on her Facebook page calling for national unity and asking us to support the troops. Unlike past years when the GOP and its surrogates would flog the 9/11 horse vigorously, the right seems fairly sedate today (although I haven't heard Limbaugh or Beck yet). Fox News' coverage this morning was staid, as was CNN's. In fact, MSNBC was the network most gratuitously milking America's heartache, replaying the entire Today Show from eight years ago.

There's one person for whom every day must be 9/11, former VPOTUS Dick Cheney. Recently, Cheney has given several interviews criticizing the Obama administration's approach to dealing with the interrogation of suspected terrorists. He invariably claims Bush administration policies have been responsible for preventing another 9/11, as he did in this interview with Fox News Sunday's Chris Wallace: "Those interrogations were involved in the arrest of nearly all the Al Qaeda members that we were able to bring to justice. I think they were directly responsible for the fact that for eight years, we had no further mass casualty attacks against the United States."

Well, that's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 was an extraordinary event that only succeeded through the brutal tenacity of its authors, aided by the usual ineffectiveness of government officials. Simply put, it was a one-shot deal. There is no way a terrorist can ever again take over an airplane with a box-cutter. Although horrific, 9/11 was an anomalous event. With all due respect to Cheney, it isn't waterboarding that's forestalled another 9/11 – it's the fact 9/11 was an incredibly rare occurrence that's very unlikely to be repeated.

This morning, President Obama participated in some local 9/11 commemorations, where he's using the occasion as an opportunity to call for national service. While Obama says in his Daily News article he wants to continue to "take the fight to the extremists" in Afghanistan and Pakistan, by and large he's not using the occasion to rally American bellicosity. It may be a sign that the emotional resonance of the terrorist attacks has receded, and, for the most part, we've put 9/11 behind us. Maybe that's not a bad thing.