This morning, the great city of New York will once again hold a ritual ceremony that has become a fixed part of its annual agenda for a quarter of a century. The names of the 2,977 men, women and children who died in the terrorist attacks on World Trade Center’s twin towers on September 11 will be read aloud while millions of Americans watch the commemoration on TV with a mixture of grief and anger.
This year, however, there will be a small but significant change in the mise-en-scene of the annual event as families of victims will reportedly shun the new Mayor Zahran Mamdani who does not endorse the generally accepted narrative if what was the biggest terror attack in history. In other words, a tragedy that initially brought all Americans together in anger and grief may now forge into another fissure along partisan lines, at least in New York.
Reflecting on that issue, I decided to re-read the 570 pages of the 9/11 Commission Report and to my surprise, I found that even then partisan divisions had prevented a proper understanding of the tragedy and the lessons to be drawn from the start.
Reading "The Report" was like going through a French nouveau roman. It starts with the promise of uncovering an ingenious plot, but offers nothing but re-heated platitudes served with a pseudo-philosophical garnish. The reader ends up asking: where is the beef?
It all starts with what looks like a misunderstanding of the mission of the commission. The commissioners tell us that they had three aims:
- To offer "the most complete narrative" of the events. But what the report offers is a collage of numerous articles and books that have already covered the "event".
- To assemble as many personal testimonies as possible of the survivors of the attacks and their families. This, though, a laudable effort, is of little help in identifying the ideology and the machine that produced the killers in the first place.
- Making recommendations about ways and means of preventing similar attacks That should have been the "meat" of the report. It is not. It was, in fact, its Achilles heel. The reasons are not hard to imagine. The commissioners have a politico-technocratic mindset. They are the products of a political culture that assumes that all problems have technical and bureaucratic solutions. Such solutions are standard: create a new layer of bureaucracy and spend some more money.
The commission itself was a typical product of such thinking. So, it was not surprising that it came up with only two new proposals: one is to create a Cabinet post dealing with intelligence, a twin for the existing Homeland Security tsar. The other is a suggestion to spend money on “improving the lives of disaffected youths in Arab and other Muslim countries”.
I am not kidding! Less than 10 percent of the report, basically its Chapter II, was devoted to the key question: who were these terrorists, where did they come from, and what made them tick?
The report said: "We learned about an enemy who is sophisticated, patient, disciplined, and lethal. The enemy rallies broad support in the Arab and Muslim world by demanding redress for political grievances, but its hostility towards us and our values is limitless." Leaving aside the odd syntax - obviously someone insisted that the last phrase be added - the paragraph quoted above shows how the commission got on the wrong track. The report assumes that there was a single, readily identifiable enemy. This is the routine way of political thinking, as shaped during the Cold War.
Anyone with knowledge of the Arab countries and the Muslim world in general would know that this is not the case. The problem with the 25-year war on terror is precisely that the democracies, and those Muslims who aspire after democracy, are faced with a multi-faceted threat that assumes numerous forms.
This war has to be fought in numerous battlefields and against many enemies that, though united in their efforts to destroy democratic societies, first among them the US, use a bewilderingly wide range of weapons and tactics. The George W Bush administration opened the military theater of this war by “liberating” Afghanistan and Iraq and seeking to destroy the terrorists nested there.
But this is a war that must also be fought in diplomatic, cultural, religious, and, above all, political battlefields. In all those theaters the US needed, and could have found, allies, including among a majority of the Muslims who have been the first victims of terror. The commission made no suggestions about how to engage in those battlefields, who to choose as allies and who to identify as neutrals or foes.
Now, this enemy does not grow on trees. He is a citizen of a state, has bases and safe havens not in space, but in real countries, and uses all the facilities of the modern global system. It was astonishing that the 9/11 Commission chose to fly over all that. It discovered extensive contacts between al-Qaeda and 24 governments in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
Tom Kean, the Commission's Republican Chairman came up with his own gem of a phrase. "Although we are safer today, we are not safe," he asserted. Well, how can you be safer if you are not safe in the first place? What he meant was that Americans are less unsafe now than they were on the eve of 9/11.
The commission asked why was it that terrorists especially hated America but provided no answer. The answer could be found in hundreds of books, articles and sermons that make the round across the globe, including in the United State itself. In fact, though you might find it odd, the bulk of what the global anti-American industry produces comes from the US itself. The US is an "evil animal" because it can bite back when bitten. The 9/11 Commission failed in its mission.
The culture war between the MAGA camp and the wokeist coalition of crypto-Communists and bleeding heart liberals shows that the failure has continued for a quarter of a century. The Hate-America ailment has crept even into the commemoration ritual in New York.
