We were a terrified country after 9/11. Terrified that more
and worse would be coming. Few at the time dared to predict that we would go
for two decades without anything like that happening again.

Perhaps in our fear, we overreacted to some extent. Any
American over the age of 10 if not younger (roughly two-thirds of all Americans
alive today), must have had some fear of being in the wrong building at the
wrong time or getting on the wrong airplane. One top of that, anyone in a
position of responsibility for American security whether involving questions of
airport security, detainee interrogation policy, or the life and death
decisions of the use of military force, must have had another fear in mind:
being responsible for failing to prevent the next attack.

From my observation, the question of who was responsible for
9/11 became a partisan issue much more quickly than, for example, who was
responsible for the catastrophe at Pearl Harbor 75 years ago. President Bush in
particular should take some comfort on this occasion, and the country should
know that all of the criminals who carried out the 9/11 attack were in the
United States not long after his inauguration and that even killing Osama bin
Laden with a drone strike, had we been able to do so, would not have stopped the
operation. Indeed, it might only have made 9/11 appear to be Al Qaeda’s
retaliation for the murder of their leader. When 9/11 commissioner Slade Gorton
asked Richard Clarke, one of the Bush’s harshest critics, whether if all “the
recommendations that you made on January 25th of 2001. . . had all
been adopted, say, on January 26, year 2001, is there the remotest chance
that it would have prevented 9/11?” Clarke had a one-word answer: “No.”

It is no accident that there was no repetition of 9/11. That
result was the product of an historic national and international effort to root
out terrorist networks, deny them sanctuary, frighten some governments
(unfortunately not including Pakistan) into giving up state support for
terrorism, and take untold hundreds “off the battlefield,” although, as we are
discovering most recently in Kabul, removing them to jail or confinement in
Guantánamo has often had only a temporary impact.

That success was the result of the hard work and sacrifice
of hundreds of thousands of Americans, particularly those in our military and
our clandestine services, who risked life and limb in the service of keeping
the country safe and whose families were left at home worrying about their
safety and too often grieving their loss.

One hopes that we will be as fortunate in next 20 years, but
there is already reason for doubt. Because this victory is marked by the absence
of calamities that might have happened, and not by a formal surrender on the
deck of an American battleship, Americans are inclined to complain about the
costs of this “forever war” rather than thinking about ways to combat terrorism
more efficiently. Abandoning Afghanistan to a terrorist organization is
definitely not the way to do that.

President Bush was right in saying that this fight against
terrorists would be a generational fight and the terrorists will not abandon it
no matter how much we might wish to ourselves. They were already
experimenting with anthrax in Kandahar before we interrupted them. Today they may
be pondering how to engineer more deadly viruses. 

This blog post is a revised excerpt from Paul Wolfowitz’s essay in the collected recollections of AEI scholars reflecting on the 20th anniversary of 9/11

The post Recollections on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.