September 11

In Friday's Wall Street Journal Opinion pages, they had asked a group of leading national security thinkers to respond to the question: Did the United States overreact to the 9/11 attacks? Here are portions of their answers:

From Paul Wolfowitz, who served as deputy US Secretary of defense from 2001-2005:

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese-Americans were put in concentration camps. That there was no comparable overreaction after 9/11, and that we have been able to preserve a free and open society, owes much to the fact that for 10 years there has been no repetition of those terrible attacks.

From Anne-Marie Slaughter, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, and served as the director of Policy Planning at the State Department from 2009-20011:

One way in which Americans have overreacted, however, is emotionally--by assuming, as we so often do, that our experience of terrorism was qualitatively different from the experience of Europeans, Indonesians, Indians, Africans and others. We have since watched and admired the courage and determination of the British after coordinated attacks on subways and buses in July 2005, and of the Indians after the 10 coordinated shooting and bombing attacks in Mumbai in November 2008.
The world likewise watched the many acts of bravery and heroism on 9/11, from firefighters and police to the group of passengers who rushed the cockpit on United Flight 93. But as a society we were unable to resume business as usual in the way that the British and Indians and many others have done. Because the sensation of vulnerability to violent attack on American soil was so new to us, we gave the terrorists the satisfaction of knowing that they had changed our lives dramatically.
The lesson here is the power of resilience over revenge. As emotionally satisfying as the killing of Osama bin Laden and the attacks on other al Qaeda leaders are, in the long run they are a less effective response to terrorism than enhancing the resilience of our infrastructure, our economy and our people. If we are prepared for an attack and can return to normal as quickly as possible, even while grieving--with our planes flying, our markets open, and our heads high--we can diminish the impact and hence the value of that attack in the first place.

In its entirety from Mark Helprin, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and author:

When this war was brought to us, deliberations should have centered upon the aims and execution of our response. Instead, we debated its justice, and thus "whether or not" rather than "how best." The question here at issue echoes this, as if to inquire about the power of the shot rather than if it has hit its target. The answer is that in the absence of strategic clarity we have lurched from one extreme to another.
We underreacted in failing to declare war and put the nation on a war footing, and thus overreacted in trumpeting hollow resolution. We underreacted in attempted quickly to subdue and pacify, with fewer than 200,000 soldiers, 50 million famously recalcitrant people in notoriously difficult terrain halfway around the world. We are left with 10,000 American dead here and abroad, a bitterly divided polity, a broken alliance structure, emboldened rivals abroad, and two fractious nations hostile to American interests with little changed from what they were before.
We overreacted by attempting to revolutionize the political structure--and therefore the religious laws with which it is inextricably bound--of a billion people who exist as if in another age. The "Arab Spring" is less a confirmation of this illusion than its continuance. If you think not, just wait.
We underreacted when we allowed our military capacities other than counterinsurgency to atrophy while China strains for military parity--something that the architects of our national security a decade ago thought laughable, now deny, and soon will hopelessly admit.
Rather than embarking upon the reformation of the Arab world, we should have geared up, sacrificed for, and resolved upon war. Then struck hard and brought down the regimes sheltering our enemies, set up strongmen, charged them with extirpating terrorists, and withdrawn from their midst to hover north of Riyadh in the network of bases the Saudis have built within striking distance of Baghdad and Damascus. There we might have watched our new clients do the work that since 9/11 we have only partially accomplished, and at a cost in lives, treasure, and heartbreak far greater than necessary.

And to conclude from Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic:

And I have one other anxiety: that we will overreact to our "overreaction." If we conclude, as we are everywhere counseled to do, that the time has come for the United States to recede from the forefront of history, we will compromise and injure ourselves, and our allies, and all freedom-seeking people around the world.

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"Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have." Ronald Reagan

So with this in mind.... the American flag is flying on the front of my house. I am going to work on my newsletter and watch football today. The Steelers play at 10 and my Boys play tonight. Life ever goes on, resilient.

Much love,

PK the Bookeemonster