Of the three attacks that have provoked the United States into a major war—in 1861, 1941, and 2001—only one came as a complete surprise. Fort Sumter had been under siege for months when, just before daybreak on April 12, 1861, Confederate batteries around Charleston Harbor, after giving an hour’s notice, opened fire on the Federal position. The Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, was a violent shock, but only in the nature and extent of the destruction: by then, most Americans had come to believe that the country would be dragged into the global war with Fascism one way or another, though their eyes were fixed on Europe, not the Pacific.
The attacks of 9/11 were the biggest surprise in American history, and for the past ten years we haven’t stopped being surprised. The war on terror has had no discernible trajectory, and, unlike other military conflicts, it’s almost impossible to define victory. You can’t document the war’s progress on a world map or chart it on a historical timetable in a way that makes any sense. A country used to a feeling of command and control has been whipsawed into a state of perpetual reaction, swinging wildly between passive fear and fevered, often thoughtless, activity, at a high cost to its self-confidence. Each new episode has been hard, if not impossible, to predict: from the first instant of the attacks to the collapse of the towers; from the decision to invade Iraq to the failure to find a single weapon of mass destruction; from the insurgency to the surge; from the return of the Taliban to the Arab Spring to the point-blank killing of bin Laden; from the financial crisis to the landslide election of Barack Obama and his nearly immediate repudiation.
Adam Goodheart’s new book, “1861: The Civil War Awakening,” shows that the start of the conflict was accompanied, in what was left of the Union, by a revolutionary surge of energy among young people, who saw the dramatic events of that year in terms of the ideals of 1776. Almost two years before the Emancipation Proclamation, millions of Americans already understood that this was to be a war for or against slavery. Goodheart writes, “The war represented the overdue effort to sort out the double legacy of America’s founders: the uneasy marriage of the Declaration’s inspired ideals with the Constitution’s ingenious expedients.”
Pearl Harbor was similarly clarifying. It put an instant end to the isolationism that had kept American foreign policy in a chokehold for two decades. In the White House on the night of December 7th, Franklin Roosevelt’s Navy Secretary, Frank Knox, whispered to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, “I think the boss must have a great load off his mind. . . . At least we know what to do now.” The Second World War brought a truce in the American class war that had raged throughout the thirties, and it unified a bitterly divided country. By the time of the Japanese surrender, the Great Depression was over and America had been transformed.
This isn’t to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each created a common national narrative (which happened to be the victors’ narrative): both wars were about the country’s survival and the expansion of the freedoms on which it was founded. Nothing like this consensus has formed around September 11th. On the interstate south of Mount Airy, there’s a recruiting billboard with the famous image of marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima, and the slogan “For Our Nation. For Us All.” In recent years, “For Us All” has been a fantasy. Indeed, the decade since the attacks has destroyed the very possibility of a common national narrative in this country.
The attacks, so unforeseen, presented a tremendous challenge, one that a country in better shape would have found a way to address. This challenge began on the level of definition and understanding. The essential problem was one of asymmetry: the enemy was nineteen Arab men in suits, holding commercial-airline tickets. They were under the command not of a government but, rather, of a shadowy organization whose name no one could pronounce, consisting of an obscure Saudi-in-exile and his several thousand followers hiding out in the Afghan desert. The damage caused by the attacks spread outward from Ground Zero through the whole global economy—but, even so, these acts of terrorism were different only in degree from earlier truck, car, and boat bombings. When other terrorists had tried, in 1993, what the hijackers achieved in 2001, their failure to bring down one of the Twin Towers had been categorized as a crime, to be handled by a federal court. September 11th, too, was a crime—one that, by imagination, skill, and luck, produced the effects of a war.
But it was also a crime linked to one of the largest and most destructive political tendencies in the modern world: radical Islamism. Al Qaeda was its self-appointed vanguard, but across the Muslim countries there were other, more local organizations that, for nearly three decades, had been killing thousands of people in the name of this ideology. Several regimes—Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan—officially subscribed to some variant of radical Islamism, tolerating or even supporting terrorists. Millions of Muslims, while not adherents of Al Qaeda’s most nihilistic fantasies, identified with its resentments and welcomed the attacks as overdue justice against American tyranny.
A crime that felt like a war, waged by a group of stateless men occupying the fringe of a widespread ideology, who called themselves holy warriors and wanted to provoke the superpower into responding with more war: this was something entirely new. It raised vexing questions about the nature of the conflict, the enemy, and the best response, questions made all the more difficult by America’s habitual isolation, and its profound indifference to world events that had set in after the Cold War.
No one appeared more surprised on September 11th, more caught off guard, than President Bush. The look of startled fear on his face neither reflected nor inspired the quiet strength and resolve that he kept asserting as the country’s response. In reaction to his own unreadiness, Bush immediately overreached for an answer. In his memoir, “Decision Points,” Bush describes his thinking as he absorbed the news in the Presidential limousine, on Route 41 in Florida: “The first plane could have been an accident. The second was definitely an attack. The third was a declaration of war.” In the President’s mind, 9/11 was elevated to an act of war by the number of planes. Later that day, at Offutt Air Force Base, in Nebraska, he further refined his interpretation, telling his National Security Council by videoconference, “We are at war against terror.”
Those were fateful words. Defining the enemy by its tactic was a strange conceptual diversion that immediately made the focus too narrow (what about the ideology behind the terror?) and too broad (were we at war with all terrorists and their supporters everywhere?). The President could have said, “We are at war against Al Qaeda,” but he didn’t. Instead, he escalated his rhetoric, in an attempt to overpower any ambiguities. Freedom was at war with fear, he told the country, and he would not rest until the final victory. In short, the new world of 2001 looked very much like the bygone worlds of 1861 and 1941. The President took inspiration from a painting, in the White House Treaty Room, depicting Lincoln on board a steamship with Generals Grant and Sherman: it reminded Bush of Lincoln’s “clarity of purpose.” The size of the undertaking seemed to give Bush a new comfort. His entire sense of the job came to depend on being a war President.
What were the American people to do in this vast new war? In his address to Congress on September 20, 2001—the speech that gave his most eloquent account of the meaning of September 11th—the President told Americans to live their lives, hug their children, uphold their values, participate in the economy, and pray for the victims. These quiet continuities were supposed to be reassuring, but instead they revealed the unreality that lay beneath his call to arms. Wasn’t there anything else? Should Americans enlist in the armed forces, join the foreign service, pay more taxes, do volunteer work, study foreign languages, travel to Muslim countries? No—just go on using their credit cards. Bush’s Presidency would emulate Woodrow Wilson’s and Warren G. Harding’s simultaneously. Never was the mismatch between the idea of the war and the war itself more apparent. Everything had changed, Bush announced, but not to worry—nothing would change.
When Bush met with congressional leaders after the attacks, Senator Tom Daschle, the South Dakota Democrat, cautioned against the implications of the word “war.” “I disagreed,” Bush later wrote. “If four coordinated attacks by a terrorist network that had pledged to kill as many Americans as possible was not an act of war, then what was it? A breach of diplomatic protocol?” Rather than answering with an argument, Bush took a shot at Daschle’s judgment and, by implication, his manhood. Soon after the attacks, William Bennett, the conservative former Education Secretary, published a short book called “Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism.” The title suggested that anyone experiencing anything short of total clarity was suspect.
From the start, important avenues of inquiry were marked with warning signs by the Administration. Those who ventured down them would pay a price. The conversation that a mature democracy should have held never happened, because this was no longer a mature democracy.
Illustration: Guy Billout
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