9–11 at 4

As the fourth anniver­sary of the ter­ror­ist act on the world trade cen­ter approaches, I have started doing an assess­ment of the efforts since then.

Before we dive in, I’d like to pro­vide a word of cau­tion to my more con­ser­v­a­tive read­ers. The fol­low­ing piece will be a lot more crit­i­cal of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion than I usu­ally am on this site. As the piece unfold, you will real­ize why I con­sider what is prob­a­bly the defin­ing event of my gen­er­a­tion to be a list of mis­steps, mis­cues, and missed opportunities.

We will never forget

It’s hard to believe, now four years later that the nation swore that it would never for­get what hap­pened on that day. Beyond New York and Wash­ing­ton DC, how­ever, it seems that peo­ple have moved on. I was even told to do so, dur­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with peo­ple out­side of the strike zones. It’s easy for peo­ple who only wit­nessed the mat­ter on tele­vi­sion to do so; It’s a lit­tle harder for peo­ple who wit­nessed it first hand; It’s even more dif­fi­cult for those who lost friends in it; And I can­not even start to imag­ine how dif­fi­cult it would be for those who lost fam­ily mem­bers in it. Some of us have not for­got­ten and it is our bur­den to bring it back, at least once a year, dredge up the dust and see how well we are doing in our recovery.

Since then, we’ve seen the largest reor­ga­ni­za­tion of gov­ern­ment, with an intent to pre­pare it for a major cri­sis, and its first test with the dis­as­ter in New Orleans; we’ve seen two wars, one with the intent to bring cul­prits to jus­tice, the other with unclear objec­tives; we’ve seen the first steps of a recon­struc­tion that may or may not be going slower than expected; and we’ve seen gov­ern­ment work on finan­cial appro­pri­a­tions that seemed to go any­where but on the areas that need it.

… and so, we pick up the pieces and do the eval­u­a­tion, and the assess­ment is, when faced with core facts, sadly inap­pro­pri­ate for an event in which over 2,000 peo­ple lost their lives. Let’s dig in on the details…

Dis­as­ter preparedness

As a result of the 9/11 dis­as­ter, the U.S. gov­ern­ment reor­ga­nized itself to be more pre­pared for when future dis­as­ters struck. A new depart­ment, named the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity was tasked with the respon­si­bil­ity of coör­di­nat­ing any effort relat­ing to dis­as­ters, man-made or other, hap­pen­ing on U.S. soil.

The first major test came not from a man-made event but from hur­ri­cane Kat­rina and its after­math and, if the event of the last cou­ple of weeks are show­cas­ing how suc­cess­ful or unsuc­cess­ful the depart­ment of home­land secu­rity was at pro­tect­ing the home­land, I feel a lit­tle less secure now than I did on the morn­ing of Sep­tem­ber 11th, 2001.

I will leave it to oth­ers to dig into whether the levies were under dis­re­pair due to poor money allo­ca­tion but it is with­out a doubt that the sce­nario of one of those levies break­ing and flood­ing all of New Orleans was one that DHS should have pre­pared for. As opposed to the morn­ing on Sep­tem­ber 11th, 2001, this last dis­as­ter was one where the gen­eral pub­lic was aware that it was com­ing. In fact, in the days lead­ing up to the hur­ri­cane, breath­less reports on most of the 24-hour TV news net­work talked about how the levies in New Orleans were a poten­tial risk if the hur­ri­cane were to hit the city. Wor­ries about a poten­tial flood were so high, the gov­ern­ment asked for a mas­sive evac­u­a­tion of New Orleans prior to the hur­ri­cane, and yet it did not pro­vide buses or other modes of trans­porta­tions to help those who did not have trans­porta­tion get out of the area.

Kat­rina did not hit New Orleans head on (that dis­tinc­tion went to Gulf­port, Mis­sis­sippi, which is now what one could only call a for­mer city, the destruc­tion of the area being so com­plete that it is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine a city once existed there) and yet, it was seri­ously dam­aged. Kat­rina was known of sev­eral days in advance, and yet gov­ern­ment trucks with sup­plies did not roll into the city until a few days after the dis­as­ter. Images of peo­ple stranded in the Super­dome made their way to the air­waves, and yet the head of FEMA and DHS did not seem to know there were peo­ple there until four days later.

If this is the kind of response the U.S. gov­ern­ment now has to dis­as­ters, please give us back the pre-9/11 response sce­nario. At least, on that day, police and fire offi­cers were there within min­utes, FEMA was there within hours, and peo­ple were helped within a day or so.

Some will say that the response was dif­fer­ent because this was an “act of God” but one could war­rant that the only dis­tinc­tion that exists between an act of God and an act of man is that God gave us warn­ing. Had a ter­ror­ist group decided to blow up one or more of those levies in New Orleans, I believe the response would not have been any better.

I now worry more than I did in the days prior to 9/11 and it is not because I fear ter­ror­ist more (hav­ing lived in France in the 80s, the age of ter­ror­ism is one I grew up in) but it is because I fear that our pre­pared­ness to a major dis­as­ter, whether it is a ter­ror­ist one or an act of God, is worse today than it was on the morn­ing of 9/11. If a ter­ror group where to attack the sub­way tun­nels in New York city (let’s assume they’d blow up a bomb in one of the under­wa­ter tun­nels, com­bin­ing the hor­rors of 9/11 with those of Kat­rina), or if a major earth­quake were to struck Cal­i­for­nia (Los Ange­les or San Fran­cisco in par­tic­u­lar), I fear that the U.S. gov­ern­ment in un-ready in accom­plish­ing the first duty of any gov­ern­ment: pro­tect­ing its people.

The Hunt for Bin Laden

If the gov­ern­ment is not ready in deal­ing with a cri­sis after the fact, let’s look at what it is doing to deal with the peo­ple that are respon­si­ble, when a cri­sis is man-made. After 9/11, we were promised that those who were respon­si­ble for the attack on the World Trade Cen­ter would be brought to jus­tice. The main cul­prit, we were told, was a man by the name of Osama Bin Laden, who heads a group called Al Caeda. Based in Afghanistan, the group is a coali­tion of sev­eral ter­ror­ist groups around the world and has been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt to be respon­si­ble for the hor­rific act in New York.

Four years later, Osama Bin Laden is still free, sup­pos­edly some­where in either Afghanistan or Pak­istan, based on what I’ve read of expert accounts in sev­eral news­pa­pers. And four years later, Al Caeda’s capa­bil­i­ties do not seem to have dimin­ished much. In fact, they seem to be on a new roll: recently, they claimed respon­si­bil­i­ties for bomb­ing in Madrid, Spain, and Lon­don, UK.

The U.S. did accom­plish the top­pling of the Tal­iban, which was the Afghan gov­ern­ment host­ing ter­ror­ists. How­ever, it seems that the new gov­ern­ment is hav­ing prob­lem try­ing to regain con­trol of the coun­try. Some areas in Afghanistan are ruled by war­lords, some of whom have aligned them­selves with the Tal­iban, and demo­c­ra­t­i­cally elected lead­ers are mur­dered on a reg­u­lar bases by forces friendly to or asso­ci­ated with the Tal­iban. In other words, Afghanistan is a coun­try that is tee­ter­ing on the edge of a civil war, with a few Amer­i­can troops left behind (a sub­stan­tial por­tion of the US troops on the ground were relo­cated to Iraq after that con­flict started) attempt­ing to keep the whole coun­try from imploding.

Mean­while, Bin Laden is tak­ing advan­tage of the con­fu­sion and the rough ter­rain (the south of the coun­try is very moun­tain­ous, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to do a suc­cess­ful man-hunt) to hide and con­tinue direct­ing global ter­ror efforts via fre­quently leaked audio or video­tapes bring­ing encour­age­ment to his sup­port­ers. His demo­niza­tion may have been for­got­ten in the United States but it has not been for­got­ten by US-opponents who are now see­ing him as a ral­ly­ing point, thus strength­en­ing his power glob­ally, and increas­ing the ranks of Al Caeda. As a hunt, it has been a major fail­ure and as a fight against ter­ror­ism, it has been a disaster.

War in Iraq

So instead of try­ing to locate Bin Laden, the U.S. lead­er­ship has been try­ing to shift the fight­ing ground, first by talk­ing up a pre­sumed link between Iraq and the ter­ror­ists that struck the world trade cen­ter (sev­eral gov­ern­ment inves­ti­ga­tions later, the exis­tence of such link has been refuted time and time again by com­mis­sions appointed by the same pres­i­dent who has led the administration’s effort at cre­at­ing the link in the first place.) That sup­posed link and the sub­se­quent infer­ence by mem­bers of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion that we had to invade Iraq before we ended up see­ing “a mush­room cloud over an Amer­i­can city” led to a con­flict that low­ered the rep­u­ta­tion of the United States around the world (a day after the WTC was destroyed, French pres­i­dent Jacques Chirac declared “Today, we are all Amer­i­cans” a cou­ple of years later, France has become one of the biggest oppo­nents to the Iraqi conflict.)

While the U.S. admin­is­tra­tion was build­ing up its case to invade Iraq, mil­lions of peo­ple in the US and abroad made the counter-case: that, while Sad­dam Hus­sein was a hor­ri­ble indi­vid­ual, he was a despot under con­trol, weighted down by years of U.N. sanc­tions and that what would fol­low his removal would be poten­tial anar­chy in a coun­try that con­trols almost 20 per­cent of the world’s oil reserve. The case was also made that an inva­sion of Iraq would be costly in terms of invaders’ blood and that it would prob­a­bly help strengthen, not weaken, ter­ror­ists as it gave them some­thing to point to the evil­ness of the west.

Sadly, the inva­sion of Iraq went through, with the United States and United King­dom lead­ing the charge, and few oth­ers fol­low­ing. The first days looked very good as the forces met with very lit­tle resis­tance, mak­ing it into Bagh­dad within days, cap­tur­ing Hus­sein within months and look­ing as if all the nay-sayers had been wrong…

… but time has told another story. While the ini­tial suc­cess of the inva­sion of Iraq could have been cause for praise, the fol­low­ing years have been a long descent into hell with many of the worst pre­dic­tions made by oppo­nents of the inva­sion turn­ing from con­jec­ture to truth. At the cur­rent time, Amer­i­can troops have suf­fered over 2,000 casu­al­ties with more com­ing every day; ten­sion between Sun­nis, Kurds, and Shi­ites are increas­ing to the point where the coun­try may soon be fac­ing civil war… and Al Caeda has been using the inva­sion as not only a recruit­ing tool (claim­ing that the impe­ri­al­ism of the west is the rea­son for their fight, a big of cir­cu­lar logic on its own as it was not the rea­son they gave for 9/11) but also as a train­ing ground in urban war­fare for their future recruits.

Much as the cold-war Afghani proxy fight between Rus­sians and Amer­i­cans had been a train­ing ground for the Bin Laden gen­er­a­tion of ter­ror­ists, Iraq is turn­ing out a new gen­er­a­tion not only of insur­gents but also of future car­ri­ers of atrocities.

The new argu­ment com­ing from the admin­is­tra­tion is that it is bet­ter to take the fight to the ter­ror­ist than it is to have them to it to us. This argu­ment, which is how Saudi Ara­bia has man­aged to be an exporter of ter­ror by remov­ing its more extreme ele­ments to for­eign places like Afghanistan, is start­ing to show wear and tear. In the case of Saudi Ara­bia, they have recently seen attacks against for­eign­ers in their own coun­try. In the case of the West, Lon­don and Madrid stand as painful reminder that the fight is not just located in Iraq but is metas­tiz­ing into a can­cer that infil­trates every soci­ety. It may not have hap­pened in the United States since 9/11 (and thank god for that) but I fear that it is only a ques­tion of time before they strike again.

As a tool in the war on ter­ror (a term recently replaced by “strug­gle against vio­lent extrem­ists” or SAVE, an acronym which makes me feel a bit uncom­fort­able), the Iraqi con­flict has been a dis­as­ter and one can only hope that the sit­u­a­tion will not get any worse than it is now.

Finan­cial Appropriation

Con­sid­er­ing the dif­fer­ent fail­ures at the fed­eral level, one hopes that more is hap­pen­ing at the local level and that the fed­eral gov­ern­ment has been doing a good job at pro­vid­ing cities and states with what they need to defend them­selves against ter­ror­ist attacks.

From a New York stand­point, things haven’t been par­tic­u­larly rosy. New York City may have been the pri­mary tar­get on Sep­tem­ber 11th, 2001; the New York area may have a pop­u­la­tion of 20 mil­lions peo­ple (8 mil­lions in the city ), rep­re­sent­ing roughly 10 per­cent of the US pop­u­la­tion but Con­gress decided to use a dif­fer­ent for­mula to cal­cu­late finan­cial appro­pri­a­tions of counter-terrorist funds. As a result, places like Mon­tana or Wyoming find them­selves with per capita appro­pri­a­tions that are sev­eral mul­ti­ple larger than the per capita appro­pri­a­tions the New York area (or for that mat­ter, any other major Met­ro­pol­i­tan area) does.

But the real irony is that the city ends up giv­ing the fed­eral gov­ern­ment more of that money than any other area. In other words, if there were no fed­eral allo­ca­tion of money for ter­ror­ism, New York City would find itself with more money to fight ter­ror­ism than it is under the present case.

And, con­sid­er­ing the recent dis­as­ter in New Orleans, there is another sad fact to take into account: when the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity was cre­ated, the Fed­eral Emer­gency Man­age­ment Agency (FEMA) was folded into it. As more allo­ca­tions were made to fight­ing ter­ror­ists, some of the money was taken from deal­ing with other issues. Some of the money that was taken away was money to deal with ensur­ing that some of the infra­struc­ture was kept in good shape. As hur­ri­canes and earth­quakes took a back sit to fight­ing ter­ror­ists, repair­ing lev­ees in order for them to be able to sur­vive dur­ing a nat­ural dis­as­ter became less impor­tant. The images of the last cou­ple of weeks are a painful reminder of the cost of such calculation.

Recon­struc­tion Confusion

Four years later, there is, how­ever, one bit of good news: at ground zero, a new build­ing is ris­ing… but not the one you’d expect. World Trade Cen­ter 7, which burned down a few hours after the hours col­lapsed, is ris­ing anew above ground zero. It rep­re­sents a bea­con of hope for all New York­ers who went through that hor­ri­ble day.

Sadly, the rest of recon­struc­tion at ground zero has been pretty hor­ri­ble, with petty fights break­ing out between the dif­fer­ent indi­vid­u­als and agen­cies involved in said recon­struc­tion. The result is that, four years after the tow­ers went down, there is still a large hole not only in our hearts but also in the New York grounds. Inspired archi­tec­ture was promised, then dis­missed as con­cerns about secu­rity took hold. Instead, we may soon see what may either be the most beau­ti­ful bunker or one of the most awful tow­ers to grace the New York City sky­line. As a sym­bol of rebirth, it will be one brought force by fear and anx­i­ety, not by the opti­mism and hope­ful­ness that once were the hall­mark of this country.

… and four years after our world changed, that is a damn shame.