The 9/11 attacks and the reaction to them seemed to start a new phase of American history. Within less than two years, the United States began two wars, declared it had the right to take preemptive military action against countries it deemed threatening, and hardened its campaign against terrorism to include torturing prisoners captured abroad. At home, the government undertook a sweeping security program that included electronic surveillance without warrants, intrusive searches at airports, and color-coded alerts that raised and lowered national anxiety. In the process, Washington accrued new powers, often with little public debate or even public knowledge. The enhanced powers of the state were not restricted to security; in 2008, when the economy nosedived, the government lent hundreds of billions of dollars to banks and financial firms with much secrecy and little oversight.
The United States felt different in 2011 than it had ten years earlier. But much that seemed novel after 9/11 had roots in the previous fifty-six years, in the country’s quest for international power and stability, in struggles over the meaning of democracy, in debate over the proper role of government, in the push to expand mass consumption, in the shift from industry to finance, and in changing ideas of national greatness. The troubled first decade of the twenty-first century represented the legacy of postwar America as much as a break from it.
September 11, the War on Terrorism, and the Costs of Empire
The 9/11 attacks came out of history, not from outside it. For over a half century, the United States had pursued an expansive international political, economic, military, and cultural presence. Across the world it figured large, directly and indirectly, in the lives of billions of people, just as life within the United States depended more than ever on what happened outside it. Before World War II, it would have been difficult to imagine that developments in so distant a place as Afghanistan mattered to many Americans, but a half century of imperial reach brought echoes of events halfway around the world back home, sometimes with deadly effect.
September 11 stunned America. There had not been a foreign-launched attack on the United States proper since 1814. The scale of death and suffering in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania exceeded the toll of any accident or violent incident since World War II. The experience millions of Americans had watching the 110-story World Trade Center towers collapse, live on television, had no precedent, as the solidity of their society seemed to disintegrate before their eyes.
During the years after World War II, most Americans had believed their country to be benign in its global activities, helping others as much as promoting its own interests, leaving the country ill-prepared for the murderous hostility it faced on 9/11. In his justifications for terrorism, bin Laden, while denouncing “Crusaders,” Jews, and Western involvement in the Middle East, pointed to specific historical events and political grievances, including the establishment of U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia prior to the first Gulf War, Western control of Middle Eastern resources, and American backing for Israel and corrupt Arab regimes. Washington spurned any effort to review the events, circumstances, and policies that led to 9/11, as if that would somehow excuse the attacks or shift blame away from the perpetrators. The attacks, the president repeatedly said, were an act of evil, the work of “evildoers,” positioning them as a form of moral and spiritual pathology rather than an outgrowth of political and military conflict. Bush’s rhetoric echoed the Manichean formulations used during World War II and the Cold War that counterposed free and slave worlds, good and evil, rights and repression. Like Harry Truman before him, Bush described a battle not over national interests or geostrategy but over a “way of life.”
Though the huge military-security apparatus that the United States had built up since the outbreak of World War II had failed to protect it on 9/11, seven decades of militarism conditioned American leaders to see the problem of terrorism in martial terms. The Bush administration responded to the attacks by launching a “war on terror” directed at “every terrorist of global reach” and “any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism.” Just hours after the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, according to the notes of one of his aides, said the United States had to “go massive—sweep it all up—things related and not” to bin Laden.
Many senior figures in the Bush administration had held government posts during the latter part of the Cold War and had sought to build up military strength to counter the Soviet bloc. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the major restraint on the use of military power disappeared. Easy victories against overmatched opponents like Grenada, Panama, Serbia, and Iraq (the first time) fueled overconfidence in the ability of the United States to reshape other nations and bred a recklessness that American leaders had generally avoided during the Cold War.
At first it seemed that the United States would be able to leverage its technological and economic superiority to project military power and impose order on its own terms. Right after 9/11, the United States demanded that the Afghan government turn over al Qaeda leaders and close the group’s training camps. When the Taliban government refused, the United States launched a military offensive against it, using a combination of airpower, special forces, and intelligence operatives and massive cash outlays to buy the cooperation of warlords and dissident political factions. Within two months, the Taliban regime collapsed.
But the victory turned out to be far from complete. The new Afghan government, headed by exiled anti-Taliban leader Hamid Karzai, proved limited in its ability to exert its authority, allowing for the eventual resurgence of the Taliban. Renewed violence took an increasing toll on American forces, with 1,446 deaths as of the end of 2010. And while the United States succeeded in shutting down al Qaeda operations in Afghanistan and killing many members of the group, bin Laden managed to escape into Pakistan when American armed forces failed to mobilize sufficient troops to surround him during a fierce battle in the Tora Bora mountains in late 2001.
Even as the World Trade Center and Pentagon smoldered, Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and other Bush administration leaders pressed for a response that encompassed more than going after terrorists. September 11, they believed, presented the opportunity for a broader reordering of the world, especially the Middle East, along lines congenial to American interests and values. Getting rid of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, they argued, would be a start toward reconstructing the Middle East and a demonstration to terrorists and hostile states of the reach of American power and its willingness to use it.
The Bush administration put forth two reasons for invading Iraq. Most importantly, it claimed that Iraq had defied UN resolutions demanding it shut down its programs to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons of mass destruction [WMD]. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney also claimed that Saddam had ties to al Qaeda and promoted terrorism. Both assertions were false. In July 2002, the head of British foreign intelligence reported after meetings in Washington, “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” That summer a senior Bush adviser told a reporter, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
During the Bush administration, the United States behaved more frankly as an imperial power than at any time since the early twentieth century. In a June 2002 speech at West Point, Bush said the Cold War strategies of deterrence and containment did not suffice against new kinds of threats. In the face of terrorism and “unbalanced dictators with weapons,” the United States needed “to be ready for preemptive action.”
The Iraq War implemented the doctrine. The United States attacked Iraq because it seemed like it could, at relatively low cost; supply-side war. Kenneth Adelman, a onetime aide to Rumsfeld and Jeane Kirkpatrick, captured the mood of conservatives when he wrote in the Washington Post that “liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.”
Post-9/11 fea
r, patriotism, and deference to authority facilitated the drive to war. The media swallowed whole-hog false administration claims, with liberal newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post beating the drums of war. Large demonstrations against an invasion of Iraq, at home and around the world, had no impact on the actions of the United States and its allies. Some Republicans and Democrats opposed invading Iraq, but the president easily won congressional authorization for military action.
Within three weeks of the initial attack on Iraq in mid-March 2003, American forces captured Baghdad and the Iraqi army melted away. The war, though, had just begun.
Bush administration leaders thought that removing Saddam and his circle would be all that was needed to create a new, democratic, free-market Iraq, given what they believed was a sophisticated society, with oil reserves that could pay for reconstruction, and a population they assumed would be grateful to the United States for ridding it of a brutal dictator. They pointed to post–World War II Germany and Japan as examples of how democratic societies could emerge under U.S. tutelage once autocratic regimes had been decapitated.
Nothing could have been more wrong. In Germany and Japan, not a single U.S. soldier was killed during their occupations. Over four thousand Americans died during the occupation of Iraq. Bush and his closest advisers paid little attention to postwar planning, having rejected before taking office the idea that the United States should get itself involved in “nation building.” Instead, they assumed that the Iraqi military and police would maintain postwar order, while a new political leadership would quickly emerge and the economy would blossom with privatization and increased oil production.
None of this happened. Instead, as soon as U.S. troops reached Baghdad, looting began. It continued for weeks, as American soldiers stood by, too few, as a result of Rumsfeld’s lean war plan, to impose order. By the time the looting ended, innumerable industrial facilities and almost every government building, from the national museum to ministry headquarters to ammunition dumps, had been stripped of everything of value, making it impossible to quickly restore any semblance of normality and putting tons of arms and explosives into circulation. Within months, serious military resistance to the occupation ramped up from Saddam loyalists, anti-occupation nationalists and Shiite groups, and foreign terrorists who flocked to Iraq, eager to take on the Americans. Sectarian violence, primarily between Shia and Sunni, took a ghastly toll.
As the Bush administration belatedly realized it would have to actually administer Iraq, it assembled an occupation bureaucracy stunning in its incomprehension and incompetence. Since World War II, the United States had developed far-reaching global interests while remaining parochial in its domestic culture, leaving it ill-equipped for old-fashioned, on-the-ground imperialism. The head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), L. Paul Bremer, a longtime diplomat and associate of Henry Kissinger’s, styling himself an imperial consul like MacArthur in Japan, quickly made a series of disastrous decisions, including banning every member of Saddam’s Baath Party from government service and dissolving the Iraqi army, leaving tens of thousands of armed men without pay, many of whom joined the anti-occupation insurgency.
The CPA staff had little expertise or experience in postwar reconstruction or the Middle East. As in Vietnam, the United States tried to run another country from a small island of America, the “Green Zone” in the heart of Baghdad, complete with swimming pool, sports bars, American food, a fleet of SUVs, and almost no Americans who could speak Arabic. Recent college graduates with connections to the Republican Party or conservative think tanks were given huge authority over a country they knew nothing about. As what started as a brief conventional war morphed into a long, brutal counterinsurgency struggle, more and more Iraqis turned against the American-led coalition.
After years of fighting and a “surge” of U.S. troops sent to Iraq in 2007, violence in the country diminished and the government set up after national elections took increasing responsibility for basic state functions. But Iraq remained violent, unstable, and underdeveloped. Five years after the invasion, electricity production only modestly exceeded the preinvasion level, which had been depressed by years of international sanctions, making infrastructure development and maintenance difficult. Oil production remained below what it had been under Saddam.
The cost of the war was horrendous. For the United States, it was the bloodiest conflict since Vietnam. An estimated 100,000 Iraqi civilians died.
A vast expansion of the national security apparatus accompanied the war on terror. One of the great changes in American life after World War II had been the development of a national security state, which in the name of fighting communism and other dangers engaged in a wide range of often secret activities. The end of the Cold War brought a modest cutback in covert surveillance and policing, but 9/11 reversed that trend, as the security sector grew larger, more intrusive, and more willing to push legal and constitutional limits.
The shock, fear, and national unity after 9/11 enabled the Bush administration to accrue extraordinary powers. In late October 2001, Congress, with massive majorities, passed the USA Patriot Act, which expanded authority for domestic wiretapping, allowed the government to track Internet and financial activity, and eased the requirements for search warrants. Congress appropriated $40 billion for domestic security and the fight against al Qaeda, followed by over $80 billion more over the course of the next two years. Bush established the Office of Homeland Security, later made a cabinet department, which took over border security and immigration control and included the Transportation Security Administration, set up to replace the private contractors providing air travel security. By the end of the decade, the counterterrorism apparatus had grown staggeringly large, according to the Washington Post involving over a thousand government agencies and nearly two thousand private companies working at ten thousand locations, with an estimated 854,000 people holding top-secret security clearances.
Some steps the Bush administration took secretly, without congressional approval, including setting up a program of warrantless electronic domestic surveillance. Bush directives denied captured foreign terror suspects access to any court, allowed them to be held indefinitely without charges, and permitted the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” that in some cases amounted to torture. In February 2002, Bush announced that the United States would not consider the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war, to which it was party, applicable to fighters captured in the war on terror.
In choosing to conduct the antiterror campaign as it did, the Bush administration was promoting an agenda that predated 9/11. Many of its top members bemoaned what they saw as a weakening of the executive branch, especially the presidency, in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. Reversing a historical pattern in which liberals had been the main backers of a strong presidency, conservatives embraced the idea of a potent executive branch. Dick Cheney—more powerful than any previous vice president—aggressively promoted far-reaching presidential action unrestrained by congressional or court oversight, international agreements, or public disclosure.
The U.S. government used all the power it gave itself, and then some, to try to extract information from captives accused of terrorism. Some suspects were handed over to allies that the United States knew would use rough treatment or torture to extract information, so-called rendition. Others were whisked off to secret CIA prisons set up around the world, where they were subjected to isolation, violence, and torture (often conducted by contractors, part of a general policy of hiring civilian companies to do work once done by military, intelligence, and police organizations). For less important captives, the United States erected a large prison complex, with open-air cages, at its Guantánamo Bay base in Cuba.
Though such post-9/11 practices shocked many Americans when they eventually were revealed, seen as departures from long-standing notions of law, morality, and national values
, they had historical roots. The most notorious torture technique used after 9/11, waterboarding, the simulated drowning of prisoners, was a variation of a torture method used by the U.S. Army on Filipino independence fighters early in the twentieth century. During the Cold War, the federal government had been explicit in saying that it would do whatever was necessary to defend the United States, and it did many unsavory things, from attempting assassinations to supporting death squads to using mind-altering drugs and other coercive techniques in interrogations. But the revelations of torture at CIA detention centers, the leaking of photographs of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison, and the shooting of Iraqi civilians by contractors working for the American government undermined the claims by the United States of moral superiority, on which the justification for its wars partly rested, and presented a disturbing image of what kind of society it had become.
Americans selectively looked to the past to guide themselves forward. In his diary, Bush called 9/11 “the Pearl Harbor of the 21st Century” and took to calling himself a “war president,” putting himself in the same category as Lincoln and FDR. The media called the site of the collapsed World Trade Center “ground zero,” an adoption of the World War II term for the point directly below the nuclear bombs exploded at the Trinity test site and in Japan. In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush used the phrase “axis of evil” to describe Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, recalling Germany, Japan, and Italy, the Axis powers of the Second World War. Later, in announcing the end of major combat in Iraq on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, the White House drew on the dramaturgy of the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, with a speechwriter consulting General MacArthur’s address in preparing Bush’s remarks. (Bush also looked to World War II in rejecting anything like the internment of Japanese Americans and seeking to minimize public and government discrimination against Muslims.) But analogies to the past obscured the changes that had taken place in the United States and its circumstances. Al Qaeda, a small if deadly organization, never represented the existential threat to the United States once posed by Germany and Japan and later by the Soviet Union, while North Korea, Iraq, and Iran had far fewer resources and much more modest records of aggression than the original Axis powers.
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