Ross Douthat: It’s Still the 9/11 Era

Ross Douthat is an Op-Ed columnist at The New York Times  .The New York Times.

Osama bin Laden is dead. So is Saddam Hussein, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and too many Qaeda No. 3’s to count. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is awaiting his military tribunal. George W. Bush is home on the ranch, Dick Cheney is on book tour, and even Gen. David Petraeus is a general no more, having traded in his stars for a civilian position atop the Central Intelligence Agency.

But 10 years to the week after the twin towers fell, we are still living in the 9/11 era. The names and faces are different, the White House has changed hands, and the country has turned its gaze from our distant wars to the economic crisis on the home front. But American foreign policy is still defined by the choices our leaders made while ground zero smoldered, and the objectives they set. Our approach to the world was fundamentally altered by 9/11, and nothing that’s happened since has undone that transformation.

Part of this transformation was tactical: a shift from a criminal justice approach to counterterrorism that emphasized investigations, arrests and successful prosecutions, to a wartime approach that emphasized detention, interrogation and assassination. The other part was strategic: a decision that America’s national security required promoting democracy across the Muslim world — by force of arms, if necessary — rather than accepting the kind of stability that various dictators had promised to supply.

Taken together, these two shifts gave us the Bush administration’s most controversial policies, from Guantánamo Bay and “extraordinary rendition” to the invasion of Iraq and the nation-building effort that followed. Some of those policies were walked back in the second Bush term. (The waterboard vanished from our interrogation repertoire, and there were no further wars of choice.) But the overall transformation endured.

It has endured under Barack Obama as well, his campaign promises notwithstanding...