9/11: Can the US ever recover?

Those of us who were around when JFK was assassinated can recall where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news. So it is with 9/11. We remember vividly the events that were live-streamed to our eastern Australia TV sets during the late evening on the other side of the clock. As for me, I went live to air on Geraldine Doogue’s ABC program the next morning, trying to make sense of what had happened.

Like many others who have lived in the world of counterterrorism and national defence planning, I’m still trying to make sense of it.

But as America’s international behaviour since 9/11 so clearly demonstrates, the damage of 9/11 is burned deeply into the American psyche. America is perpetually hyper-vigilant, and perpetually defensive. It constantly reaches for military solutions to complex problems where diplomacy and some self-reflection might offer better outcomes. It fosters a revolving door of national intelligence leaders and intelligence agency heads. US Presidents appoint pals rather than experts to key positions. And the in-built mechanisms of the Oval Office in fact generate adversarial relationships between the President’s key advisors and, more significantly, the American people and the agencies tasked with protecting them.

Fundamentally, nothing could have prepared the US for what happened on 9/11. The barriers to preparedness were cultural and systemic. America’s complacency, its conceit, its exceptionalism and the resultant pervasive hubris had lulled it into the self-congratulatory myth that “it could never happen here” — its long experience with gun violence notwithstanding. But if the cultural forces induced a fatal nonchalance, the systemic forces were even more devastating.

America is built on competition, individualism and unchallengeable self-belief. Everything competes with everything else, not least of all the institutions that shelter behind the screen of defence and national security. Where they don’t cannibalise each other, they eat each other’s lunch. They neither communicate nor collaborate. Least of all do they cooperate and coordinate. They can’t, because they are structured not to do so.

The 9/11 Commission Report is devastating in its commentary and conclusions. But the Congressional Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities is even more confronting. It details the multi-dimensional and multi-layered failure of the principal intelligence agencies and the US intelligence apparatus as a whole to protect the nation and its people against a relatively unsophisticated terrorist attack.

There’s no reason to think that those problems don’t still exist.

The 9/11 attacks drew America ineluctably into the war in Iraq — a massive, if understandable, over-reaction that served no purpose but vengeance and wild retaliation. The attacks set the fuse for a quarter of a century of pointless US armed conflict in the Middle East and Afghanistan. This conflict sucked America into a black hole of punch and counterpunch with no visible escape hatch. The consequences for America and the global community at large are dire: economic uncertainty, political instability and the strategic repositioning of power in ways that harm both America and its allies.

That has been evident again this week, as the far-right One Nation brawls with Andrew Hastie, on any measure, a serious and upright member of the national Parliament over serious and credible allegations of war crimes committed by another Australian during the “War on Terror” as waged in Afghanistan. Australia continues to support that war through its deep enmeshment with the United States.

While Australians, if not their government, grapple with the nature of that relationship, the Trump administration is evidently not for changing. But more significantly, nor is the American governing elite. The existential provocation of 9/11 is burnt into the American psyche and informs a foreign and strategic policy mindset from which there is no alternative but armed force. The transformational legacy of Roosevelt and Eisenhower has vanished, to be replaced by a transactional recipe for tit-for-tat short-termism. So, initiatives that fail — which is all of them — have no exit.

But more importantly, 9/11 has sucked in America’s allies, perhaps none more completely than Australia. John Howard’s immediate response was to invoke the ANZUS treaty, without any Cabinet consultation so far as anyone knows, and commit Australia to the open-ended defence of the US. There was no common cause, save the coverall of “global terrorism”, nor a common geographic theatre.

It was the same for America’s European allies, who solemnly pronounced that an attack on America was an attack on everyone who values peace and freedom. Rhetoric can be emotionally and politically satisfying. But it is never a strategy.

So, how’s America doing in the aftermath of 9/11? In a word, badly. Its inability to address the basic cultural, political and structural antecedents of 9/11, prevent it from shaking off the incubus of profound failure in what is emblematic of the US – New York. More than that, it is unable to rediscover the constructive internationalism that distinguished its early post-WW2 decades. It is mired in a self-absorption that is both the cause and consequence of 9/11.

To fix the problem demands transformational and visionary American leadership, which is simply not on the horizon. This in turn demands deep self-reflection on Australia’s part if we are to establish self-direction and self-responsibility in a crucial bilateral relationship.