In posts this past Thursday, September 11, Esquire’s Charles Pierce and New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait reflected on parallels and potential parallels between America’s response to the 9/11 attacks and our developing response to the ISIS threat.
Pierce lamented President Obama’s escalation of the fight against ISIS and speculated that it will cause Americans to act much like we did for a few post-9/11 years when we “jumped at shadows, heard voices in our heads, ducked and covered and lost our minds.” He did, however, give Obama credit for his attempt “to find logic to the derangement that broke out on this day, 13 years ago.”
From Pierce’s post (emphasis added):
So it is the 13th anniversary of the day on which America was successfully encouraged by murderers to lose its mind and, last night, the president gave a speech entangling the United States in another combat situation in another place in that same part of the world against a different group of murderers who have taken it on themselves to encourage America to lose its mind…
…Rachel Maddow was right last night. Americans will be in combat in [Iraq and Syria], and they will be making war on the people who live there, and no euphemism can hold back the blood...
What happened in New York 13 years ago deranged a nation that was almost begging to be deranged. The Soviet Union was gone. Grenada, Panama, the First Gulf War, the Balkans, in all these places where we made war, we had what were essentially walkover victories. We had no geopolitical enemies, no country strangling our trade, or impressing our seamen, or bombing our Pacific fleet, or pointing nuclear missiles at our cities any more. Then the planes hit the towers, and the towers came down, and we had an enemy again. We declared war on a tactic. We declared war on "terror."
The concept was so patently absurd that dozens of other absurdities naturally flowed from it, the most glaring of which was the preposterous and mendacious case made for our invasion and occupation of Iraq. We jumped at shadows, heard voices in our heads, ducked and covered and lost our minds, and there were people in positions of power who were happy to oblige us for their own political and economic benefit. Then, we elected a new president, and the new president extricated us from the occupation of Iraq, and from whatever the hell we were doing in Afghanistan…But the war on the tactic never ended because it cannot end. You cannot defeat "terror," because it has too many allies, some of them in your own government…
…There are substantial political constituencies, both here and abroad, for the national derangement that began in 2001 to continue. And I think that last night's speech was, in part, an attempt to challenge those constituencies to come out of the shadows and show themselves…
…[Obama] is groping, still, to find logic to the derangement that broke out on this day, 13 years ago.
And Chait contended that the rise of ISIS has made neocons nostalgic for the days of orange terrorism threat advisories and predictions of a “cakewalk” in Iraq (emphasis added):
In the wake of 9/11, neoconservatives both exploited and were victimized by a collective freak-out. All the things they are doing now, they did then: the “serious” trope, the hysterical threat assessment, the simplistic conflation of mutually antagonistic strains of Islam, and the complete lack of concern for the possibility of overreach. The memory of the 9/11 attacks has left most of us with some sense of sobriety and regret. The neoconservatives, by contrast, look back on that time of fear and rage with increasingly undisguised longing.
