[Note: In addition to being the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attack, today caps a very big week in the world of AI. For more on that, see the video I’ve posted below, after my obligatory 9/11 reflections.]
This week I heard on the radio that the 9/11 Museum in New York is encouraging us to “Never Forget”—and indeed has set up a “Never Forget” fund. Well if I were running the 9/11 Museum, I’d try to get that message out, too. But if I were in charge of US foreign policy, the message I’d try to get out is: “Forget! Forget! Forget!” Dwelling on 9/11 is what initiated and helped sustain a disastrous quarter century of American adventurism abroad.
I mean, sure, if America’s leaders had rationally assessed the causes of the 9/11 attack, dwelling on it could have been productive. They might have started by looking into the conditions that gave birth and subsequent energy and direction to al Qaeda, and pondered the following possibilities: (1) Maybe the US shouldn’t have staged a proxy intervention in Afghanistan two decades earlier that flooded the place with weapons and created the cauldron that enticed, shaped, and revved up a young Osama bin Laden (and also created the violent chaos that allowed the Taliban to take control of Afghanistan—a position the Taliban used, during the runup to 9/11, to provide safe haven for bin Laden and al Qaeda). (2) And maybe, after the Persian Gulf War of 1991, the US shouldn’t have established an enduring military presence in the Islamic holy land, Saudi Arabia—a presence that became a persistent and powerful bin Laden grievance and helped direct his belligerence toward America.
Conceivably, such reflections on the past could have led to such ideas about the future as: Maybe what the US should avoid after 9/11 is further military adventures in Muslim countries. After all, such adventures might continue to be conducive to the creation or growth of militantly anti-American groups—and might also prove a godsend for any terrorist recruiters who wanted to focus their efforts on young alienated men already living in America.
If the memory of 9/11 had set in motion trains of thought like this, I’d be OK with remembering. But here’s the thing about hijacking airliners, slitting the throats of flight attendants, and flying two of the airliners into the two tallest buildings in America’s biggest city and one of the airliners into America’s military headquarters: This kind of thing, by its nature, is unlikely to yield a calmly reflective and well-reasoned response. That’s why they call it terrorism.
So instead of a well-reasoned response we got a “global war on terror” that involved inflicting US military force on several Muslim countries—which, in addition to getting hundreds of thousands of people killed, destabilizing the Middle East, and fueling the growth of groups like ISIS, inspired “home grown terrorism” in America. And, since mainstream US media largely glossed over the home-grown terrorists’ repeated and explicit statements that they were retaliating for the deaths of their co-religionists at the hands of the American military, this terrorism helped sustain the fiction that the source of the threat signaled by 9/11 lay somewhere within the essence of Islam, or at least the essence of a major variant of Islam, rooted ultimately in a violent intolerance of freedom, or Christianity, or secularism, or something. The lesson seemed to be that if we didn’t want to live under Sharia law, we’d better keep fighting.
Among the consequences of this post-9/11 foreign policy trajectory may well have been Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House. It’s easy to forget how much candidate Trump, back in 2016, played on insecurities about “radical Islam” and the “jihadists” in our midst, but he did so deftly and effectively. Had there been no ISIS, and no Pulse Nightclub shooting of 2016 (whose perpetrator repeatedly cited America’s bombing of Muslim countries as his sole motivation), and no Muslim refugees pouring out of various countries that we’d attacked either directly (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya) or by proxy (Syria), Trump probably wouldn’t have ever sat in the oval office.
Of course, the other way all the post-9/11 US military adventures helped Trump is by becoming so unpopular that his promise not to repeat them held powerful appeal. He became the president who promised not to get us into stupid wars in the Middle East.
Well, that was then. Now America is mired in a stupid war in the Middle East. And one thing that made it politically easy for Trump to launch that war is American attitudes toward Islam—which have gotten much more negative since 2002, perhaps in part because of the aforementioned blowback from those ill-advised US military adventures. Six months after 9/11, 25 percent of Americans said Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence, and in 2004, a year after the invasion of Iraq, the number was 46 percent; this year it was 51 percent.
Nine days after 9/11, I published a piece in Slate called “Feels So Good,” about the dangers of letting retributive impulses guide our actions. As I noted, the retributive instinct—by which I mean not just vengeful feelings but the intuitive sense that punishing bad deeds is a moral good—was created by natural selection in a particular environment that was very different from the environment we’re in now. And in the environment we’re in now, following this instinct can backfire in newly catastrophic ways.
What I was basically saying was: Sometimes just forgetting about affronts you’ve suffered is better than responding to them in a way that feels good and true in the moment. I didn’t get everything right in my post-9/11 commentary, but that basic message is one I stand by.
Note: It should go without saying that to argue that ill-advised American policies made particular kinds of violence more likely isn’t to absolve the perpetrators of the violence from moral or legal responsibility for their transgressions. But bitter experience teaches me that this doesn’t go without saying, so I’m saying it. And I was glad to see Peter Beinart make that point this week in a short video he posted on his substack, The Beinart’s Notebook. And speaking of Peter’s substack: Since it’s part of the NonZero Network, paid NZN subscribers can get a 50 percent discount on a paid subscription to it. The magic discount link is just beyond the paywall below.
And finally: It’s been a very big week in AI—and in the politics of AI. Liron Shapira, host of the Doom Debates podcast, joined me yesterday to review and assess the week’s news. You can also find this conversation on the NonZero podcast feed and the Doom Debates podcast feed.
[Relatedly: If you want to check out my book on AI, The God Test, you can read the introductory chapter and excerpts from all other chapters at thegodtest.net.]