In his 9/11 20th anniversary column in the Washington Post David Ignatius tries to contrast two different things:
Radical pessimism is a mistake on this 9/11 anniversary. These two decades witnessed many American blunders but also lessons learned. Our military commanders discovered how to project power at relatively low cost, in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Despite the Taliban’s triumph, Islamist radicalism has been gradually on the wane — in Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and a half-dozen other places.
and
What’s indisputably true is that a cycle in U.S. history has ended. I don’t just mean the post-9/11 effort to remake the Middle East by force. A larger process has been at work over the past century, as the United States gradually replaced the European colonial powers and took up their burden. This post-post-colonial era is dead, thankfully. The American people won’t stand for it anymore, and neither will the rest of the world.
There is so much wrong with the first it’s hard to know where to start. I can think of any number of lessons we should have learned but I can’t think of one that we have actually learned. “Relatively lost cost” are weasel words. Relative to what? There’s no fixed standard so it’s non-disprovable. Since 2001 we’ve spent more than $6 trillion making war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Perhaps that is relatively low cost to Mr. Ignatius but it sounds like a lot of money to me particularly since I’m skeptical that any of that spending has made us the least bit more secure than we were on September 10, 2001. Today is the anniversary we should be celebrating. And what is his evidence that “Islamist radicalism has been gradually on the wane”? I think it’s just biding its time and, indeed, will always be there under the surface.
And is the “post-post-colonial era” really dead? I think that the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists who reliably call for military interventions and, indeed, like Mr. Ignatius, believe we should be at war forever in Afghanistan are completely unrepentant. They, too, are just biding their time. As evidence I would point out that the Biden Administration is full of them: Samantha Power and Susan Rice immediately leap to mind.
I question being “more secure†now than in 2001. Looking at the ease and glee with which the Taliban captured Afghanistan, along with the instant brutality exercised by them to the Afghan people, where is the improvement, either over there or even here? Today the Talibans are in control of sophisticated armaments, planes, equipment – something they didn’t have in 2001. Some are even referring to Afghanistan as now being a super terrorist state, from which even greater episodes of terror can be imported to the U.S. And, are we really out of there? Lindsey Graham is already hinting of having to go back in…to clean up the mess left behind.
All that military equipment should very soon be useless unless someone can supply them with parts and maintenance. A lot of the big things were disabled before Americans abandoned them.
At the risk of irritating those people who have heard all this before.
Mohammad Atah, close friend and associate of Osama Bin Laden and one of the 19 hijackers, was well known to our CIA. Yet he was allowed in country even after President Clinton’s attempts to kill Bin Laden with missile strikes.
(Vito Corleone would have known better)
Reason being that Congress had browbeaten and hamstrung the CIA for investigation of American citizens overseas. So when the suspicious Saudis landed on US soil, they became the problem of the FBI, and the FBI alone, in CIA agent’s view. Let them do their own job. They didn’t pass the information along.
No one on our side knew the plan, and these certainly were not the only suspicious persons of interest at that time. But Atah was too close to Bin Laden to be ignored.