The twenty-fifth anniversary of the massacres of September 11th, 2001, brings with it a flood of memory, and regrets. The simple reality, visible at the time and brought into ever-sharper focus across each successive year, is that the enemy in Al Qaeda achieved its major strategic objects in its attack upon the United States of America. Although the day itself saw the virtues of Americans in aggregate brought to the fore — most especially in the raw heroism of the Flight 93 passengers, but also in the selfless sacrifice of FDNY, NYPD, and unnumbered Americans known and unknown who saw death for themselves and gave in the hope of life for others — it also illuminated with great rapidity the strategic incapacity of American political leadership. It is an incapacity yet to be fully repaired.
Although I am not a New Yorker, I was by circumstance present in New York City the day of the massacres. My then-fiancée, working on Water Street, saw it all up close and lived a harrowing morning: the second aircraft plunging into the World Trade Center tower, a descent in panic down her own skyscraper’s elevators to the ground floor, an emergence onto a street with flaming debris cascading downward, and in an episode we still invoke in wonder today, a fifteen-minute wait for a payphone so she could call me and ask what to do. My counsel was to get out of lower Manhattan, preferably by train. She caught the last train to Brooklyn, alone in a car with a man who had clearly also escaped the chaos. He said aloud that it was a shocking accident. She replied that it wasn’t an accident: she’d seen it, and it was an attack. The man buried his face in his hands and wept.
When she arrived home, she had flecks of ash in her hair.
There was a lot of ash on the clear blue morning of September 11th, 2001. The skies were strewn with the detritus of murder. Even before the towers collapsed, you could see the white and flashing twinkling of papers thousands of feet aloft, fluttering against the azure and the gray of the smoke. Everyone in the path of the northwesterly wind got something from the bloodied sky. We received Nynex billing records on our patio. A business two blocks away received an in-flight safety card from one of the doomed aircraft. When the towers finally did collapse, the plumes of their deaths erupted forth the quotidian stuff of the work and lives extinguished. Walking to the Brooklyn Promenade, a singed manila folder descended from the heavens right in our path.
On the Promenade itself, the black pillars, the ashes of several thousand slaughtered Americans — I wondered in the moment if we had just surpassed Antietam — rose ever upward. The crowd was hushed, shocked, muted but not silent. A young man’s voice rose above the rest, strident and insistent: “The people who did this are still out there. They are still out there!”
They still are.
We were not, however, going to get those people, and this I divined quickly and with disappointment. The motivation and religion, one and the same, of the killers were swiftly proclaimed, and its rootedness in their faith and heritage was easily discerned. Yet within a week the President of the United States instructed Americans to turn away from the obvious conclusions: an act of historical revisionism undertaken in real time for reasons both ideological and prudential. The generations-long project of desacralization of the American public square, and the eradication of American particularity as an intrinsic value, left American elites and governance wholly unequipped when an explicitly religious tradition of war making with fourteen centuries of its own inheritance slaughtered thousands of our own. We stared down the abyss of jihad and responded as if undertaking Reconstruction.
In the days that followed, our neighborhood and every other in New York City were plastered with photographs of the dead, posted in vain hopes of finding survivors, a last act of love and faith by those condemned to live. The horror and the sorrow suffused everything, and we received our condolences from those outside the city. But we needed none. We were alive. Our families were alive. Elsewhere, in New Jersey and Staten Island and Queens and in fire stations and in schools and in homes where little children asked why daddy never came back from work, or why mommy kept playing the last message from the answering machine over and over and crying, they needed the prayers and the sympathies. They needed a nation that would vindicate them — not just in care, though care they deserved in full, but in blood.
They didn’t get it.
Some days later, working in a Brooklyn bookstore where I killed time and drew a small wage until my clearance to work as a Schedule C appointee in Washington, D.C., came through, a local-news camera crew showed up. With them was a local Muslim-immigrant couple, and our bookstore was used as a backdrop for them to describe the fear and apprehension in which they now lived. I am sorry to say that in my disgust I said nothing: thousands of murdered just miles away, bodies still smoldering in flames yet to extinguish, few incidents of retaliatory violence (and those that happened aggressively pursued and prosecuted, for the Americans are a fundamentally good people, which is not the case for all others), and here we are talking about the fears of these others.
The record of the subsequent twenty-five years bears no meaningful exposition as it is well known. We loved our fellow countrymen well enough to pursue Al Qaeda into Afghanistan but not well enough to pursue them into Pakistan: that would have to wait ten years, and even then the Pakistanis, easily our most false ally in a region full of them, received a pass. We did not insulate ourselves from the cultures that produced the massacres of our own neighbors and friends, instead seeking to prove our own virtue, if only to ourselves, by the importation of more. New York City, led by heroes twenty-five years ago, is today led by friends of the other side. We did not overthrow the regime of pathological denial that led at least one person to let the Al Qaeda murder teams board their aircraft lest they be accused of the worst imaginable sin, ethnic bigotry: instead we doubled down on it in new and terrible forms, from wokeness to DEI and beyond.
We also sent our fellow citizens to war in places known and unknown. They acquitted themselves well. They also deserved a better cause. It will be generations before the nation of Iraq deserves the sacrifices of Americans on its behalf. It will probably never happen for Afghanistan. It will almost certainly never happen for any other theater of the so-called “Global War on Terrorism,” the name itself communicating a lie that the enemy was a method rather than a belief. In this sense the paroxysm of September 11th, 2001, exposed the incapacity of American leadership in spurring it to attempted mimicry of every historical template it could think of, reenacting past victories without their context or content, and thereby guaranteeing failures all around.
When Al Qaeda set forth to murder thousands of Americans on September 11th, 2001, it did so in the belief that America would not sustain a long-term retaliatory effort, that the cost to America would be ruinous, and that America would wound itself in its own reaction. Osama bin Laden is dead at American hands, but his strategic calculus was vindicated. The enemy achieved its major strategic objects in its attack upon the United States of America. For the past quarter century, we have succumbed to it. There are exceptions — much of the Trump Administration may be understood as a reaction and correction against it — but the aggregate is its own record. On this twenty-fifth anniversary of death on a clear blue morning, we do not commemorate a victory.
But history is contingent, and on this anniversary, we can choose anew. The passengers charged the cockpit; the firemen ascended the stairs; the police went into the burning buildings; the soldiers and Marines and sailors and airmen volunteered for war. We owe them a country worthy of themselves.