We live in a broken world; we live in a broken time. But we should resolve that these dead did not die in vain. Good can be brought forth from evil. We believe this because it is part of our continuing duty and responsibility to those who died. And there is no better way to honor these dead than to work humbly and honestly for a more just world.
By December 7, 1958, the day that would “live in infamy” was a distant memory. Although we swore we might “forgive, but never forget,” we had moved on as a nation, far more obsessed with the space race (Sputnik hovered menacingly overhead) and the arms race (that mythical missile gap). In October 1979, few of us reflected on those frightening days nineteen years earlier when we came closest to annihilating our species. Instead, the “missiles of October” were lost in the fog of our collective memory, and we were caught in the throes of the Iran crisis and a greater crisis of self-confidence. Even the pain of the Vietnam War, which had haunted and hounded us as a nation for so many years, was hardly felt in 1992 as we continued our unseemly victory lap for “winning” the Cold War, and the Fall of the Wall drowned out all other voices in our ears.
September 11 is different. Seventeen years on,* and the sound of those towers crashing down still echoes through our country, and the silence of those dead still haunts those of us still living. This is difficult for Americans. Our collective attention span is notoriously short, and we prefer to flit from issue to issue, from crusade to crusade. For us, seventeen years is a very long time. We have an urgent yearning to be distracted and to move on. But I haven’t been distracted; I haven’t moved on.
What Went Wrong
We never got closure. We never got that cathartic release that comes with victory. We never even got the chance (as was the case with Vietnam) to move on to new crises and new enemies. Instead, our policies and actions over the last two decades have enabled that which we sought to vanquish to metastasize. It is a terrible realization to know that a child born in 2001 is now old enough to die on the endless battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq.
I sometimes still worry that all the publicity centering around 9/11 drowns out the cries of those who died that day. I don’t want that to happen. The dead deserve to be remembered, to be honored, to be missed. And not to be used. The tragedy of their dying was corrupted from the very start by our leaders who failed to understand why they died and who used their dying for their own objectives. On the Left, many shook their self-righteous fingers and said that while it was a tragedy, what else could you expect when the United States is so belligerent and domineering? Many on the Left are too ready to find an excuse for any crime committed. They are forgetful of the loss of these innocents, and forgetful of all those left behind who miss their fathers and mothers and spouses and children.
And on the Right, it is no better. So many of them still shaking their self-righteous fingers and using this tragedy to curtail liberty and provoke violence in places that have nothing to do with 9/11. Mischaracterizing the killers as “hating our freedom” did a great injustice to the dead. September 11 had nothing to do with a threat to freedom; it had everything to do with justice, albeit a distorted sense of justice. The killers were not evil in a Manichean sense: They were not the opposite of good. Rather, they were evil in the classic Judeo-Christian-Islamic sense: They were twisted in their goodness. They wanted justice and in pursuing what they thought to be justice, committed horrific crimes. They are an object lesson for all of us: Being too sure, being too certain that one is absolutely right and everyone else is completely wrong leads to much pain and great sorrows. Nearly every barbarism and almost every crime is committed by those who believe themselves to have been somehow injured.
What is it about this tragedy that makes it different? It is not merely because so many people died a horrible death, because so many die in so many horrible ways every day. Perhaps the answer is that this was a real tragedy, and real tragedy has two indispensable components. The first is avoidability. The inevitable, no matter how horrible, no matter how painful, at least offers the solace that it was beyond our control, beyond our wisdom, beyond what could be expected from us. But 9/11 was not inevitable; it was preventable. Some will be angry with this assertion. Inevitability is so comforting. Inevitability is so reassuring because, inevitably, it absolves us from responsibility. But this horror was not predestined.
The second essential ingredient: futility. That the suffering seemingly was in vain—that no lasting good has yet come from it. Yes, we now pay greater attention to the Islamic world, striving hard to better understand it. Yes, we have improved intelligence coordination and law enforcement cooperation, and we strive to make the world safer and more prosperous. But the threat remains, and discord in the world has not abated. In the initial aftermath of the tragedy that did not seem to be the case. Our country came together as it rarely has in our 242 years of history. More surprising, much of the world came together as it had never done in 5000 years of history. But these were fleeting visions and have not endured.
A Prayer for the Dead and the Living
I still wake up some days angry. Angry at those that flew the planes and those that rationalized the slaughter, those who danced in the streets and those who silently smirked, those who even today try to justify it and those who try to minimize it. And I cannot shake the notion that somehow we failed: we diplomats, soldiers, law enforcement officers, and other public servants. We somehow faltered and three thousand died.
And there are hard questions we need to keep asking ourselves. We owe it to the dead. What have we learned? How have our priorities changed? Is our vision less myopic? Are our policies sounder? Are we any wiser? Are we any more secure? Can we bet on a future devoid of another September 11?
There has never been a period of history when so many people have lived so freely; never a time of such great and general prosperity. Thousands each day risk their lives fighting those whose religious nihilism threatens us. Thousands more every day work long hours to protect the innocent and to lift up the downtrodden. Yet we still find our lives wanting, our security and safety still out of reach. We live in a broken world; we live in a broken time. We come from broken places. But we should resolve that these dead did not die in vain. The deaths of these three thousand should have meaning. Good can be brought forth from evil. We believe this because it is part of our continuing duty and responsibility to those who died. And there is no better way to honor these dead than to work humbly and honestly for a more just world.
Perhaps it is enough simply to say that I still see them in my mind’s eye, falling from the windows, unable to escape any other way. I see them fall and I lose faith and hope in this world. I have lost faith in everything except faith; I have lost hope in everything except hope. A once-famous but now obscure medieval Jewish scholar, perhaps inspired by Psalm 51, wrote of building an altar from the fragments of our broken hearts. To elaborate on this sentiment:
From the fragments of broken dreams, He builds a bed for restful sleep.
From the fragments of broken hope, He builds a bridge to a better land.
From the fragments of our broken lives, He builds a shelter to keep us safe.
And from the fragments of my broken heart, I will build an altar to God.
*This essay originally appeared here in September 2018.
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The featured image, uploaded by Praneeth Thalla, is a photograph of the World Trade Center Complex, June 12, 2021. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Amen
I suppose I am reifying the comments section by asking this question 2 years after you penned this article and don’t know if you’ll receive notification of new comments
You’re right that 9/11 remains an open wound. I’m up at before 3 am Hawaii Standard Time to remember when the first jet crashed into Lower Manhattan and forever changed the course of history. And our lives.
But something from your article puzzled me. At the risk of taking the conversation in an obscure direction: what did you mean by this statement: ‘our unseemly victory lap for “winning” the Cold War’?
Thank you for your diplomatic service, by the way. I lived in Skopje during the NATO campaign against Miloscevic and consider Slovenia my favorite not-America country.
Thank you, too, for your thoughtful article,
Kelli Buzzard
Hi Kelli. I’m happily surprised I saw your comment. Unfortunately, authors are not notified when comments are made. But to your question, the short answer is that I think our nation had a bad case of triumphalism when the Cold War ended and we became shamefully hubristic. For a more detailed explanation, I would refer you to a couple of my other essays, especially the one on 1989 and a Tale of Three Cities and the one in which I write a fictional letter to Putin.
I don’t understand how this was preventable. That requires explanation. In a free society there was only so much that could have been done without having foreknowledge. You even criticize “the right” for “curtailing liberties” but that’s exactly what it would have taken to prevent the tragedy.
Otherwise this was a good essay. Also don’t forget, we haven’t even completely rebuilt downtown Manhattan yet from the destruction. And people who were near the destruction are dying of cancer at high rates. These are more reasons why we haven’t moved on. Not only has victory been allusive, but our lives (at least those who live in NYC) haven’t been resettled yet.
I especially liked your prayer.
I think Manny would appreciate someone’s taking the time to explain to him why it was preventable, because that does take.time.
Dear Manny, thank you for your kind comments. And you’re right that I probably should have elaborated on what I meant by “preventable.” For what it is worth, I would say three things from my decades in government. First, under Clinton we had a couple of chances to hit bin Laden (at least according to CIA officers I know), but we equivocated because we didn’t want to risk upsetting the Pakistanis or Saudis, or violating some legal technicality. Second, bin Laden declared war on the US years before 9/11. His reason: infidel soldiers in Saudi Arabia. I would never support removing our troops from anywhere due to a threat from anyone, but we have a really bad habit of staying in places where we are not wanted or needed. Our troops needed to go to Saudi Arabia for the first Iraq War, but there really was no value in keeping them there afterwards. But our military and civilian bureaucracies operate on inertia and so we stayed there, needlessly antagonizing and further alienating Saudi citizens and religious authorities. Third, and this will seem to contradict the second point, we pampered–and continue to pamper–Saudi Arabia. Had we been tough with the Saudis throughout the Nineties, they would have been able to remove bin Laden, but neither they nor we took him seriously enough. But in fairness, there is a continuing debate and disagreement among many reasonable and decent former US officials about whether 9/11 was truly preventable. I just fall on one side of that argument.
Thank you for your response. I had forgotten to come back to this and check, so I apologize for the delayed response. With all due respect, none of that convinces me that 9/11 was preventable. Even if we had “taken out” Bin Laden – which would have been a heck of an intervention in some other country’s affairs – 9/11 was way more than just Bin Laden. He’s now dead some seven or eight years and we’re still fighting this, and if we had taken him out the people who supported him, which seems to be numerous, would have been even more motivated.
Thank you, sir. As usual, nobody writes on these subjects as elegantly and with the insight that you do. Very, very few people, especially Americans, seem to understand and appreciate your message. But obviously there are exceptions as seen in a number of the comments above. That’s extremely heartening. But as Kennan alluded to many times, an overly democratized, populist and anti-intellectual (Hofstadter) country can hardly be a fertile soil for long-term wise, bi-partisan leadership, especially in Foreign Affairs. Your comments are an essential response to the increasingly shrill, jingoistic tone of today’s leaders. We have learned nothing. In a way Putin is correct: only someone as naive as Gorbachev would take the U.S. at its word. Neither he nor Xi are likely to make that mistake.
I am not exactly sure what the the thesis of this essay is. It is not clearly outlined, and leaves more questions than answers. There is one word, justice, that appears to be a misguided reason for the acts of terror, war upon this nation, on 9/11.
I do not believe that this act of these young Muslim men, flying airplanes filled with infidels to die by their suicide, was a failed act of their want for justice. It was not a twisted goodness, nor a senseless action by these adherents of Islam. It was an act of heroism for Allah; justifying their evil act of drinking alcohol, sex with prostitues, lying to infidels, during the days before commandeering the planes. Through their successful killing, and suicides, justice will be awarded to them by Allah; that is their belief. These are acts of honor for other young men to follow.
There have been many, many acts of this kind, although in a more minor scale,? throughout the Western world, Africa, and elsewhere. There will probably be many, many more, increasing in severity. This country has been attacked by Islam from the beginning of our founding. It was a surprise to me when I read about that history. It is like a slow growing cancer that it’s host is totally unaware of its presence. Denial, ignorance, too fat and happy, a people who have turned away from the grace of the God of creation??? Lord have mercy.
I was referring to what the FBI knew and refused to take action upon. As Casey Stengel put it : “You could look it up.”
Joseph, please forgive a late response to you fine article. Question: What is the name of the “once-famous but now obscure medieval Jewish scholar”? He wrote a remarkably wise meditation which speaks to what Unamuno called “the tragic sense of life.”
James, I apologize for the very late response. I just noticed this today–we don’t get notifications when someone posts a comment. The Jewish scholar was named Judah (Yehuda) HaChasid. Best regards, Joe
Thank you!
Having faith and hope in this world–unless by in you mean while you’re here and not in the tendency of the world or humans to goodness–is illusory. We’re fallen and the world slowly decays. Original sin brought us entropy which leads all to death this side of the eschaton. Man sinned against God and the next generation (Cain and Abel) began to commit atrocities against one another.
This isn’t a call to throw up our arms and watch the world burn. Rather it’s a reminder that we empty our buckets of water on the fire out of a sense of duty even though we know the fire will not be quenched: we simply hope to create temporary escape routes for ourselves and others without concern as to what any of us were doing before escaping the fire. And with fervent prayers that we are not consumed after being pulled out.
Thanks for this..someday. I wish you would write an essay on your thoughts on Bengasi. As an expate living in Venezuela on 911….We could not get home .we were in a friendly country, .. where we lived was as international as Hong Kong…OPEC was created there, exeryone was kind, so many were living there because it was the the only courty that would take them in. We couldn’t leave for weeks..we missed funerals..we missed sharing grief. But we were safe.. I can’t imagine the American’s and Afghans living there under fear right now…
“. . .our unseemly victory lap. . .”
Communism threatened Western, Christian freedom. The Soviet leaders sincerely desired the reduction of the United States as a necessary ingredient in their rise to global dominance and the success of their disreputable philosophy. They were ready to use any means to win. They could foresee–correctly–that the success of the West would doom their social experiment and dissolve their power. Freedom is the single greatest gift of God. Without freedom to choose, Heaven loses its value and, therefore, so does life. We, the free people, defeated the soulless Soviet communists. We lived, and they died. Our celebration of this seminal moment in world history may not have been to your taste. Perhaps it hearkened to the football fields of an earlier and more certain (too certain) time. But it was wholly justified, and because it was just, it was not only seemly but also beautiful.
Thanks, Ron. I certainly agree that Soviet Communism was an existential threat to us and that is was an unspeakable horror. It was a good and wonderful thing that it fell and that we had a chance to start on a new path toward greater freedom and justice. But we faltered and did not take that path. We would have done well to re-read Proverbs 16:18 over and over again and take it to heart and let it guide our actions. Instead, we preferred to embrace triumphalism and to once again allow ourselves to strut and prance as if we were invincible and infallible. Many brave men and women deserve our respect and praise for the defeat of Soviet Communism, but among those people were not just Reagan and John Paul II, but also Carter and Gorbachev. We amazingly convinced the Soviet leadership that we were sincere in wanting an end to the Cold War, but that turned out not to be true. Within only a few years of the end of the first Cold War we were already needlessly scaring and threatening Russia by the careless enlargement of NATO, the bombing of Serbia, and by the illegal recognition of Kosovo. Instead, we should have developed a new security architecture that would include Russia. As George Kennan predicted at that time, our triumphalism and arrogance would provoke a terrible paranoia in the Russians and they would again embrace authoritarianism and militarism. Now it is too late. Ditto regarding the deluded attempts to spread our notions of democracy and freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two decades of needless bloodshed and deepening hatreds all because after the Fall of the Wall we fell from grace and convinced ourselves that we could do no wrong, that the world needed us to save it, as if we were Gods rather than mere men.
Thank you for your reply. Pride does indeed go before a fall. It is the greatest sin and the foundation of all others. As far as “strut and prance,” of course too much of such things wears on the spirits of all who are compelled merely to watch. On the other hand, who would admire a marching band that did not strut, and when do young spirits turn down the chance to prance (and when do old spirits not look back fondly on such days)? No, celebration does not belong in diplomacy, and gentlemen do not rub their opponents nose in it, but triumphalism and arrogance are only faults of the ill-bred, while paranoia is a disease. It is a commonplace to observe that America often lets itself get carried away, but our exuberance is one of the definitions of us. As far as our attempts to spread democracy and freedom go, what is the alternative? Must we stand by and watch as tyranny and oppression flourish and spread because we are spending all our time looking in the mirror to find the newest wen on our collective nose? I recall the religious philosopher Spurgeon. He said that when God gives us a gift, we must use it. He was right. When God gives us the gift of intelligence or acumen, or maybe just vigor and persistence, and we fail to use it in the pursuit of good, which is justice, then we reject the gift and separate ourselves from the body of those who strive to do right, however much they might fail.
American Exceptionalism. God looks kindly on America. The reason 9/11 happened was that the US had plotted, deceived, and played off one group against another. Criticizing Putin regarding Civilian Casualties is hypocrisy of the highest order. U S Invasion of Iraq resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths over the 20-year period. When we remember 9/11 remember the families, women, and children who were killed because we decided to invade a Country based on lies and deceit. Where are the Christians is the question?