Reader Poll: Did 9/11 "Change Everything"?
Back around 2002 to 2003, it was common for people to debating the role of government in the national security area to say that "9/11 changes everything." The idea was that the attacks of 9/11/01 had so substantially changed our sense of the terrorist threat — or at least should have — that it called for a new set of responses to traditional problems in the area of national security. Of course, this was a hotly contested idea: Some people believed that 9/11 changed everything, and others strongly disagreed. But it was a common phrase that was frequently invoked in debates over privacy and security.
I'm curious to know if VC readers agree or disagree with this statement today, almost 8 years after the 9/11 attacks. Here's a reader poll on the question that asks if you agree or disagree, how strongly, and where you generally fall on the political spectrum.
I'm curious to know if VC readers agree or disagree with this statement today, almost 8 years after the 9/11 attacks. Here's a reader poll on the question that asks if you agree or disagree, how strongly, and where you generally fall on the political spectrum.
Setting aside the adjectives, could you describe what you believe the populace and the government did that constitutes a reaction to 9/11? I am curious to see if your answers may be different than a US Citizen's.
I agree... "centrists", libertarians, and the anti-statist left all in the same category? Not surprisingly, they appear to be all over the place on their opinions as well.
Actually, the category is "other." In parentheses, examples are given of two groups that generally do not self-identify as either left or right: libertarians are one such group, and moderates are another. This does not imply that libertarians are moderates, or are "lumped together" in any sense except for not self-identifying as right or left.
Did you know that as many (or more) people died post 9/11 from driving than actually died in the terrorist attacks?
Yeah, morons started driving instead of flying. But driving is so much more dangerous than flying. Here's the study showing how stupid people believed that 9/11 "changed everything."
Calling the reaction hysterical and unintelligent is hysterical and unintelligent. It was an overreaction. But it hardly qualifies as hysterical. We have regrettably less civil liberties, but still more than most of Europe. And we regrettably used harsh interrogation methods on terror suspects, but less harsh than regularly used by the police 50 years ago here, and currently used by the police in those suspects' countries of origin.
The changes that would have actually provided the biggest benefits would have been on the foreign policy front, but nothing seems changed there.
In principle of course it didn't "call for" any of that. It called for a rethinking of priorities, like whether America is really benefiting from its colonial empire.
This is easily the best spot on the internet for (libertarian-) right-of-center news and opinion. If I read this plus Slate (and the NYT + WSJ), I feel like I've covered my ideological bases, so to speak.
Very true.
With a Republican Congress this might have happened if Bush showed any guts; but with the Democrats in charge we are doomed.
The First World War changed everything. So did the Great Depression, or Pearl Harbor, or Three Mile Island and Chernobyl (although that chain is harder for folks of average intelligence to trace out). The debacle in 1975 in Vietnam. The fall of the Soviet Union.
I've only lived through the last three of those, but each had far more lasting and profound effects than 9/11/01, unless you count endless annoyance at the airport and a new Federal bureaucracy for the poor taxpayers to feed.
Although..I guess if your "everything" is limited to political debates in the pages of "Foreign Affairs," the letters column of the NYT, or impassioned sophomoric debates about whether if the INS searches your laptop at the border without a warrant OMFG!! then can the black Marias and gulag be far behind? -- and you don't notice stuff like the price of things, real GDP growth or inflation, national courage, et cetera, then conceivably 9/11/01 changed "everything."
Actually, when I think about it, I think the introduction of the automated poll (online or Rasmussen robocalling) has probably changed 'everything' more than 9/11/01.
That said, the first few responders have a reasonable point that it should change the methods and priorities if not the basic role.
However, this is interpreting the question as my opinion of what should be, not what is. I still don't think things should have significantly changed, but I'd probably agree that they did (war, PATRIOT act, wiretapping, people being terrified of normal everyday Muslims, etc.). It remains to be seen whether or not the changes are permanent.
So I answered "strongly disagree", which to my mind is the only correct answer for a thinking person who was capable of conceiving of and contemplating mass terrorism before 9/11 (and did so), as well as contextualizing a single (albeit horrific) act within a society of 300 million people.
My inclination is to say that 9/11 changed nothing. Yes, a lot of people who had convinced themselves that the world was full of happiness and unicorns (c.f. "the end of history") discovered that this was, in fact, untrue. But the world didn't change, and was just as dangerous and screwed up on 9/12 as it was on 9/10.
Or, for another example, see Alexia's comment above, who claims that one impact of 9/11 is that the police started treating citizens as the enemy. Alexia's impression of how the police behave changed, but I don't think the actual reality of police behaviour changed significantly. (Thanks largely to the War on Drugs, the police have been acting as an occupying army for decades. 9/11 had little or no impact.)
So, if the poll question refers to people's impressions, I'd say 9/11 changed a lot. If it refers to reality, then I'd say it changed nothing.
P.S. We can also see that our government does not yet feel that the U.S. has been threatened enough to let gays serve in the armed forces -- or to keep the War On Drugs (Poppies Bad!) from interfereing with the proper conduct of a real war in Afganistan.
I suspect that was the point.
You stole my thunder. That's the basic option I was looking for...
TV (Harry)
(i) Taking out the Taliban was an appropriate response. Improving the fire-safety and evacuation capabilities of skyscrapers was another.
Claiming that terrorism was threatening the American way of life was a hysterical response — especially when the government response was the threat, not terrorism. Instead, explaining to the US people that terrorism was (and still is) a negligible threat to the US would have been the right thing to do.
The core of the hysterical response was passing various anti-crime legislation pretending that it was needed "to fight terrorism", incidentally serving to continue the hysteria and thus leaving the way open for more such legislation. Examples include the USAPATRIOT act and its renewal; restrictions on banking; fingerprinting all foreigners at the border; increasing the release of military surplus to local police forces, ostensibly due to the "anti-terrorism" function of SWAT teams.
Several additional responses (such as requiring IDs to fly and take the bus; the no-fly list; federal control and licensing of "dangerous" chemicals to the point where home chemistry sets are illegal) have no reasonable function except continuing the hysteria.
(ii) Here are some figures from Israel: Since 2000, terrorism casualties have been 1,183 dead and 8,341 wounded [figures are from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, and include security forces]. Between 2003-2008, 2792 people have been killed in road accidents. For comparison, in the US there are about 43,000 deaths annually due to motor vehicle collisions (and 55,000 due to toxins) [figures from Wikiepdia].
In other words, in Israel terrorism is a risk comparable to traffic. In the US the terrorism risk is negligible compared to driving, even if one includes all instances of domestic terrorism and assumes anti-terrorism efforts have been unusually lucky so far, so that actual terrorism deaths underestimate the risk.
Nevertheless, the US response has been surprisingly close to the Israeli response, such as searching people who enter sports arenas.
Welcome back from your sandblasting Sotomayor. :-;Of course. Particularly the Constitution and the rights it confers (in particular through the BoR). Any sane person can see that what is permissible is clearly a function of current political and societal considerations and exigent concerns.
Cheers,
Cheers,
I agree that the attack certainly changed the nation's response to non-state actors who represent threats, and it certainly caused a wide number of changes in the law, in the terms of politics, and geopolitical factors.
It didn't change, by and large, the way the U.S. relates to the world, or the way the vast majority of the body politic views things, or the set of incentives that drives the important voting blocs.
My cynical side kept changing that to "9/11 excuses everything", and still does.
My answer is,
I somewhat agree: My political views are "other" (center, libertarian, etc.)
As I see it, 9/11 was a stark reminder that organized evil in the world is real and can have a direct and devastating impact on our country as a whole. We were desensitized by essentially-solitary actors (such as the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh) and by organized attacks that may have affected us but only at a distance (USS Cole, embassy bombings, etc.). 9/11 reminded us that you can't let sleeping dogs lie.
On the other hand, the actions whose import suddenly became apparent had always been the responsibility of the country and its government, so I can't "strongly" agree that it changed everything. It strongly changed how we view the world, yes, but it didn't change our duties and responsibilities within it.
Regarding the car-crash statistic and why that sees less attention than terrorism: it is the duty of government to prevent the malign use of force by others to infringe on the rights of others. Fighting terrorism is directly preventing the use of force to infringe on the right to life. What malign use of force is there to prevent in car crashes, in general? I have some difficulty understanding how someone can in good faith suggest that the two problems, seen from the perspective of government goals and actions, are comparable in any meaningful manner.
I would think that would be relatively obvious.
The prior paradigm is one that's evidenced by Obama making the (somewhat) bolder statements about detainees than he's been willing or able to put into place as president.
It's difficult to reconcile a strong commitment to ideals and the peculiar status of the terrorist detainees.
We could very easily unilaterally decide they're prisoners of war, but then we have to ask the question what happens if we never think the war will "end" and secondarily, what if there's some people that we don't intend to let go even if the war were "over."
We could unilaterally declare them criminals and try them, but then there's the possibility of some who we rationally don't want to let go getting out for lack of proof, no matter what sort of tribunals are set up.
Then there's something in between. Which is something a great many democrats were against, and Obama campaigned against, but has since backed off of attempting to eliminate.
We'll bomb you for saying that.
Now, since the question being posed really cuts between black and white--no grays allowed--someone has to be right and someone wrong. Either 9/11 "changed everything" or it didn't.
So, who are the sane, rational people here? What is most amazing, however, is that even while proclaiming that "everything changed", those "right of center" have not adjusted their ideology in the slightest. Is that your final answer?
For whatever it's worth, I was in the World Trade Center on 9/11 and luckily had the ability and the common sense to move away as quickly as possible.
Thus, the question of whether 9/11 "changed everything" is a little more personal in nature to me.
My beliefs before and after 9/11 remain largely the same -- We should not let our desire to get the bad guys cause us to abandon the freedoms that we cherish, because then we just become like them. On the other hand, I also freely admit that the Constitution should not be interpreted as a death pact.
Trying to reconcile my statements above is more effort than a short comment response can cover. Needless to say, I believe this both before and after 9/11, although the experience of 9/11 has made me wonder whether there's a sliding scale of goalposts that we may need to recalibrate every so often.
actually, it's still used now, more often then, as now, as, "when our lives were changed forever"- maybe the biggest hack cliche ever coined. Screw it. Into action.
There is no spoon.
In my reality there is no Keanu Reeves.
Well spoon is British slang for "a foolish person," so I'd say we're in agreement.
I was in Belgium where the Red Brigades were blowing up NATO pipelines.
I was in Saudi assigned to OPM-SANG, whose HQ was blown up, and living the Eastern Province where the Khobar towers were.
I was living in France when the Corsicans were blowing up Metro stations.
I was in an embassy in Africa when the embassies in Dar and Nairobi were blown up.
I was on the CENTCOM crisis action team when the Cole was attacked.
So, when the plane impacted one wedge over from my Pentagon office on 9/11, it was SOS.
The difference was the US finally took terrorism seriously--for a while.
So, I voted strongly disagree--other.
With a Republican Congress this might have happened if Bush showed any guts; but with the Democrats in charge we are doomed."
Really? No GOP Congress 2000-20006? Does Tom Delay and Bill Frist know this?
In other news: Yesterday, the 4th circuit mostly upheld the conviction of a CIA interrogator for an assault committed during an investigation in Afghanistan. Mr. Passaro's claim that he had insufficient notice that the assault statute would apply to his "battlefield interrogation" was roundly rejected. US v Passaro. So I guess not everything changed...
Because I agree with:
But I think it should have changed "everything." And the fact that it didn't is a problem.
Are you sure your name isn't Forrest Gump? Zelig, maybe?
I think you're either dishonest or incredibly unlucky. If the former, please go away. If the latter, would you please tell us where you're going next, so we can make sure to be somewhere else? Also, please tell us what stocks you're buying so we can sell them.
Bob From Ohio,
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