Adam Garfinkle: Reflections on the 9/11 Decade
With the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of American Special Forces on May 2, 2011, the 9/11 decade may be said to be psychologically over.1 Political decades, after all, do not have to fit neatly into the calendar. Just as the Sixties began with the assassination of President Kennedy on November 2, 1963 and ended, arguably, with Richard Nixon’s resignation from the presidency in August 1974, so that successful raid constitutes a suitable bookend for a period that began on September 11, 2001.
Bin Laden’s death does not end the threat of Islamist terrorism, and in an operational sense its importance is unclear. Even if, we now know, bin Laden remained more responsible for al-Qaeda’s day-to-day operations than had been generally thought, he did not manage to produce significant results. But symbols do matter, and in this case—a case of a war unlike any that Americans have ever experienced, with much of it seemingly suspended in a psychological ether without manifest battlefields or other common accoutrements of war—they have mattered more than usual. So this is a suitable moment for a reflection, I think, not just on the death of a master terrorist, but on America’s 9/11 decade as a whole.
As with the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, all adult Americans know where they were on September 11, 2001. On that beautiful Tuesday morning I was five blocks from the White House at the fifth-floor offices of National Affairs Inc. in Washington, DC, an office that housed both The National Interest and The Public Interest magazines, the two parts of Irving Kristol’s very modest publishing empire. The Washington Monument was in its usual place outside my office window, as were, of course, the streets below. Once it had become clear that an attack was in progress, national and local media assumed a slightly manic tone. Most private offices reacted by letting their staffs go, resulting in near instantaneous gridlocked mayhem throughout the downtown part of the city. That rendered it very difficult for emergency and police staffs to evacuate the Congress and other possible near-term targets and otherwise do their critical jobs...