September 11, 2007
September 11 and Hindsight Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:35 AM EST Fred Schwarz’s lead piece on this site today describes the issue of American Heritage published in the aftermath of 9/11, for which the articles had to be written within a week of the attacks. I published an article in that issue, to which Fred Schwarz provides a link, and I followed that link with some apprehension. To my gratification and indeed astonishment, relatively little I wrote on that occasion strikes me as appallingly stupid now. At least one thought, though, seems to me to have been over-optimistic. I suggested that destroying a terror-sponsoring regime—the one at issue was the Taliban government then ruling almost all of Afghanistan, which had given shelter to bin Laden—might begin to make the sponsorship of terror less attractive to other regimes employing such tactics and proxies. In the light of subsequent history, this was a bad reading about the relationship between the Taliban and bin Laden. The former may have been the partial prisoner of the latter, rather than the latter the distinctly junior ally of the former. Also, while some positive effects of destroying a sponsor regime may have been visible at first—for example, some accounts suggest a brief period of covert Iranian overtures to the United States, and these overtures may have been further encouraged by the initial U.S. victory in Iraq—the sincerity and wholeheartedness of those overtures is disputable, as is the ability of those who made them to deliver the goods. Furthermore, subsequent U.S. difficulties in Iraq are widely said to have had the opposite effect to the one I hoped for, and are instead encouraging Iranian intransigence. Allowing an enemy to provoke you with impunity, or at the risk of only feeble and transient reprisals, does have the effect of encouraging further and greater provocations, but failed reprisals, reprisals that are perceived to have failed on a very grand scale, seem even likelier to produce further provocation. According to many accounts, the United States is now being driven out of Iraq by successful terrorism in significant part sponsored by Iran, and is being seriously harassed in Afghanistan by terrorism sponsored by elements within the Pakistani intelligence services, by terrorists permitted to shelter on Pakistani territory. This latter pattern may change, for the sponsored have recently begun murdering their sponsors, but the general tendency of events is to make terrorism look more and more like the magic bullet anyone can employ against the Americans or their allies. It is again claimed that it always works, and that the costs to the sponsor remain pretty low. If the United States is indeed driven out of Iraq by successful Iranian-sponsored terror, and/or is driven out of Afghanistan by neo-Taliban who are staging out of Pakistan, the chief price to be paid for that will be paid by Iraqis and Afghans. But we are likely to pay a price, as well, somewhere down the line, and maybe not very far down the line. The price may be much cheaper than staying in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it will not be wholly negligible. On the other hand, most people continue to acknowledge that leaving the Taliban in place while bin Laden continued his career as their visibly honored and ominously industrious guest would have been an almost inconceivably flaccid and foolish response to 9/11. Our subsequent attempt to reconstruct the government of Iraq is now widely taken to be proof that trying to do certain things is idiocy. Maybe so. It remains true that, as Christopher Hitchens likes to note, doing nothing does not mean that nothing will happen; it means that something else will happen. Knowing what not to do is not the same thing as knowing what to do. A poll reported in today’s New York Times suggests that many Americans remain unsure about what to do in Iraq. The Times itself seems to be surer, if not necessarily wiser.
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