What Israel Can Learn From America’s 9/11 Response
“I hope Israel looks hard at what the U.S. does when provoked and does better,” one reader argues.
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Last week, as observers characterized the recent attack on Israel as that country’s 9/11, I asked, “What did you learn from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and America’s responses to them?”
Replies have been edited for length and clarity.
R. writes:
I learned that Al Qaeda was a horrifically evil group in a part of the world where evil is all too common. But I also learned that separating the world into good and evil is not a good way to conduct foreign policy. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, and our war in Iraq did more harm than good. My advice to Israel is to proceed cautiously with an end game in mind.
I agree that the Iraq War was a mistake, and if anyone doubts that Saddam Hussein was an evil man, I recommend “Tales of the Tyrant,” by Mark Bowden, from the May 2002 issue of The Atlantic.
L. learned that America is resilient:
In the words of Walt Whitman: “I saw a city invincible to the / attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth.” Look around the New One World Trade Center in Manhattan and what you can easily see, if you so choose, is an indefatigable resilience of spirit. A new tower stands where the old towers fell. An impressive underground complex now fills the space that was once a crater. A memorial and a museum honor the memories of all the civilians and brave first responders who lost their lives. New York City suffered a devastating blow. It survived and ultimately thrived.
It has faced devastating blows since. Here’s my prediction: It will survive and thrive again.
It is always tempting, if not outright fashionable, to be cynical. It seems that nothing is currently more popular than dystopian dramas. Little else is heard but nihilistic nattering. And it is very easy to find legitimate fault with both the many oversights that allowed 9/11 to happen and the numerous wrong turns that followed. But if that’s all or most of what we focus on, we are likely missing a grand forest because of a few legitimately diseased trees. 9/11 can in fact be seen through the perspective of hope and renewal. Our open society endures, our democracy lives, and our values persist. I do not believe that our faults define us; rather, they challenge us to continue pursuing a more perfect union. We abandon that pursuit at our own colossally short-sighted peril.
G.Y. learned a foreign-policy lesson:
What did I learn from 9/11 and our nation’s response? First and foremost, that our military is not made for nation building. It is in fact made for, designed for, created for, and proficient at destroying things. This is no insult to our military or the men and women who serve in it. We live in a dangerously broken world, and that requires a well-trained and equipped military highly motivated and prepared to carry out distasteful dirty jobs, and to do so with honor and integrity. General Colin Powell was right about the Powell Doctrine, but very wrong regarding the notion that if you break it, you own it. That’s not so. If you break it, it’s broken, and that’s all. You will never own it.
The question is always Are we better off with a nation’s government broken or operational? This should absolutely limit our actions to just wars of defense. There’s absolutely a place for nation building. I have spent my career doing so through NGOs around the world—it’s just not the U.S. military’s core competency or mission, nor should it be.
Once we permit ourselves a clear and unflinching look at the military’s actual job, the second lesson comes into clear focus. At about the time President George W. Bush stood on that carrier [in front of a sign that] declared, “Mission accomplished,” it actually was. This is not to say that our diplomacy was done, or that everything was okay, nor is it to assume that we would not have had to go back, but the military’s mission was done and we could have actually saved a lot of blood and treasure, both American and foreign, had we pulled our military out rather than persisting in the 20-year-long fool’s errand that followed. I also suspect that 20 years later, that area of the world might be more stable and our nation safer.
John deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He writes:
While I was there, I was astounded by the U.S. Army; they were clearly there for the long haul. And it was obvious to me in 2006 that the U.S. would not be staying in Iraq. There are many lessons from 9/11, but to me the obvious lesson is this: You cannot build a multicultural, multi-sectarian nation against the wishes of its own citizens. The whole country has to recognize it has a problem and want our help. The other lesson I took from 9/11 is that somebody out there hates you. Whoever you are, somebody hates you. They hate you enough to kill you in cold blood. You should plan accordingly. That does not mean you should hate them back; that accomplishes nothing. It does mean you have to be prepared at all times. And you have to be prepared with violence if necessary.
Jaleelah is young enough to have experienced the terrorist attacks as a history lesson rather than a memory. She writes:
Learning about 9/11 and its fallout taught me that politicians, journalists, and ordinary people do not actually care about death and suffering. Please bear with me. The primary supposed explanation for the outpouring of cash and rage directed at eliminating Al Qaeda is that the United States needed to impose violent consequences on the group in order to deter its enemies from killing more of its citizens. In order to achieve that goal, George W. Bush sacrificed [more Americans than] 9/11 killed. American military forces killed and tortured additional Afghan and Iraqi civilians in the name of justice. Were those people’s lives less valuable than New York’s firefighters and businessmen? Why?
To many, the civilians dying in Gaza are unfortunate but necessary collateral damage. To me, their deaths are emotionally devastating. Gaza contains children who struggle with their homework and love their pets. It contains nurses and teachers who worry about their jobs and their parents. Gaza contains some of the tiny total population that shares my dialect of Arabic. How many of these people are worth killing in order to take out one Hamas hideout? 10? 100? 10,000? How many Gazan deaths are worth the life of one Israeli?
Everyone has a certain amount of emotional energy. I understand why many view conflicts in the Middle East through an analytical lens. I understand why people are drawn to revenge, and why they feel sadder about the deaths of people who lived lives similar to their own. But 9/11 should have taught the U.S. that making policy decisions based on rage and empathy is a dangerous path. All innocent people deserve to live freely, regardless of whether we feel emotionally connected to them. Scale of destruction should matter more than the ethnicities of the destroyed. When countries prize certain lives over others, they cause unacceptable amounts of death. After all, the logic that harming civilians is justifiable if it incurs a military advantage against an evil group is the logic Hamas used to justify taking civilian hostages. The U.S. can be better than its enemies, but it hasn’t been in the past, and I sadly doubt it will be in the future.
In contrast, S. is old enough to remember 9/11 personally:
I was profoundly disoriented by the audacity of the terror. I learned not to trust my gut reactions; my faculty of reason was temporarily disabled, overwhelmed by a visceral desire for reckoning. I learned how impotent I feel in the presence of nihilism. And I learned, yet again, how hard it is for nations to do politics well—especially powerful nations like the U.S., which is so repeatedly tone-deaf in how it deals with the “other.” I hope Israel looks hard at what the U.S. does when provoked and does better. Thus far, the U.S. appears to be giving Israel sound and sober counsel. If only the U.S. were as good at receiving such advice.
