https://www.city-journal.org/article/9-11-lessons-terrorism-immigration
One of the reasons George Santayana’s famous line about forgetting the past resonates is because humans can be so bad at remembering. That’s especially true about the past 25 years of liberal Western democracy. The twenty-first century brand of progressivism that’s corrupted so much Western thinking is all about moving on from a past inevitably deemed regressive. To someone like me, who lived through 9-11 in Manhattan and spent years writing about what we learned from it, the extent to which we have forgotten the lessons of that day and discarded so many of the principles we developed to defend ourselves is shocking.
Just perusing what City Journal published in the weeks after 9-11 is a reminder of how dangerously we as a culture have moved on. One notable story from that time warned about our “leaky borders,” which subsequent investigations would show played a crucial role in enabling the massive conspiracy that culminated in hijacking of four planes. Another piece from 2001 chronicled the rise of something called “militant Islam,” a term derided by some as racist and which prompted President George W. Bush to insist, in response, “Islam is peace.” A third story, the most chilling to read today, though it’s not principally about the U.S., described the rise of an Islamic “fifth column” in the U.K. that was radicalizing British youth. To think that I once worried that that term—fifth column—might be too extreme!
Those three stories represent how clearly we saw the threats back in 2001, and how thoroughly we’ve ignored them since then.
The irony of 9-11 is that it was successful because the bad guys learned their lessons from the past. Many people forget that the 2001 terrorists undertook the second attack on the World Trade Center. The first, eight years earlier, failed to cause widespread damage because the Muslim perpetrators underestimated how many explosives they would need to destroy the foundation of the North Tower. “Only” six people died that day. But what lived on was the idea among terrorists that the World Trade Center represented something fundamental about the West that they hated and wanted to destroy. They just needed to find a more effective way to accomplish their murderous ends.
One of the many differences between Western liberals’ thinking and that of Islamists is that they, as fundamentalists, cherish the past and absorb its lessons. We had our chance to do the same after the 1993 bombing and failed. The weeks and months after that attack were filled with executive orders, presidential directives, new legislation, and promises of international cooperations against terrorism. The Anti-Terrorism Act and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 barred terrorists from entering the country, facilitated the deportation of those here, and authorized funds to expand anti-terrorism units within law enforcement. Some of that money was supposed to go to assist coordination and communication among federal and local law enforcement.
