War is evil. This is easy to forget.
Heroism, patriotism, and moral clarity often arise out of war. But war produces mostly evil.
War means death. War makes people homeless, and it levels cities. War also causes moral harm — it destroys innocence and turns young men into killers. It also causes rashness and error.
The terrorist attacks of 25 years ago were the most evil acts of our lifetime. They also launched the United States into the “Global War on Terror,” which would last for more than two decades. Much of that war was just. It produced some good fruits. But it produced many evils, including costly, lasting mistakes by the United States government.
And those mistakes began before the dust had settled at Ground Zero.
Most disastrously, the march to war in Iraq began immediately.
Claiming that Osama Bin Laden’s “Afghan-based al-Qaeda organization does not really have the organizational capabilities to carry out such well-coordinated attacks,” uber-Hawk Laurie Mylroie argued Sept. 13, 2001, on the pages of the Wall Street Journal that Iraq was behind the attack.
A few days later, Richard Perle, a top Bush adviser, was telling Bob Novak (my old boss) that the Taliban in Afghanistan, which had harbored al Qaeda, should not be our prime target because “there aren’t that many interesting targets in Afghanistan.” The “interesting” targets were in Iraq.
Saddam’s face adorned the cover of the Weekly Standard, in a “WANTED” poster alongside bin Laden, in the magazine’s second issue after 9/11.
Hawks who already wanted a regime-change war in Iraq used the 9/11 attacks to begin building momentum for that war. The Bush administration and its allies seized on a totally unconfirmed claim that hijacker Mohammed Atta had met up in Prague with a lieutenant of Saddam. Not a single shred of reliable evidence corroborated this, and all logic and evidence undermined the claim. Nevertheless, the Bush administration clung to it.
Iraq had no connection to 9/11, yet hawks paved a war in those first days that led to the U.S. regime change war there in 2003. The war proved a disaster on a dozen levels.
Our post-9/11 problem was bigger than just an obsession with Hussein: The attacks convinced too many people in or close to power that America could and should eradicate extremism and terrorism from the world.
The hawks transformed our war against al Qaeda into the impossibly broad “Global War on Terror.” Hezbollah somehow moved to the top of the enemy’s list. When Novak suggested in a column that we ought to focus squarely on al Qaeda rather than Hezbollah, he was called “unpatriotic” and accused of “terror denial” for this.
We needed to knock the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan in order to defang al Qaeda. But perhaps infected by a post-9/11 messianic fervor, the Bush administration was convinced we could replace the Taliban with a liberal democracy. The nation-building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan both failed.
When we finally left Afghanistan nearly 20 years after the attacks, the country immediately fell back into Taliban hands. This was inevitable. Our 20-year occupation never established, and never could have established, a solid foundation for a free and prosperous Afghanistan. The project was a folly from the start.
And we made plenty of errors at home after 9/11. In October 2001, Congress expanded federal surveillance powers and curbed civil liberties with the USA PATRIOT Act, and then, in November, they created the TSA and the new airport security regime — with all its intrusive security theater.
These laws have made Americans poorer, angrier, and more frustrated. More importantly, they have habituated us to being treated as de facto criminals.
What’s more, the intrusions into our lives, in the name of security, justified future intrusions. Tom Ridge, the first Secretary of Homeland Security, months into the COVID-19 pandemic, took to the airwaves to criticize anti-lockdown protestors as selfish, using our post 9/11 “sacrifices” as an example of how we need to trade freedom for security.
STAY-AT-HOME MOMS ARE GOOD, AND AMERICA NEEDS MORE OF THEM
And tragically, there’s no reason to believe we learned many good lessons from these early mistakes. Barack Obama was right to call the Iraq War a mistake, but then he went ahead and did regime change in Libya, with predictably disastrous results that are still flaring up. Donald Trump was right to attack Bush’s war, but he nevertheless decided to launch whatever it is we are doing in Iran.
The evils of that war, which the terrorists began 25 years ago, continue to this day.