Is Frank Rich (late of the Times) earning his keep at New York Magazine?
Frank Rich introduces his cover story for this week’s New York magazine by pretending to dispel a cliché: “It was ‘the day that changed everything,’ until it didn’t.” He’s referring to 9/11, of course, but no matter how strongly he insists in the opening paragraphs that “ten years later, it’s remarkable how much our city, like the country, has moved on,” by the end of the article the reader is left with the nagging suspicion that Rich hasn’t moved on at all.
Like the majority of writers on the left, Rich favors a narrative in which 9/11 is at the heart of every significant development of the last decade. It’s a familiar argument, but also a facile one: that politicians took advantage of the fear caused by the deadliest act of terrorism on American soil to cripple civil liberties at home and advance a neoconservative agenda abroad. More convincing, however, is the perspective laid out by David Rothkopf in the August issue of Foreign Policy. He writes that “It is important to our process of consigning 9/11 to history to understand both what it was and what it was not, why it was important and why it was just one of many even greater stories of the past decade.” To demonstrate his point, Rothkopf compiles a list of ten developments that “exceed 9/11 in lasting importance,” including the proliferation of mobile technology and the rise of the “BRIC” countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China.
Both Rich and Rothkopf address the web of non-9/11 issues that have emerged in the last decade, but while Rich unsuccessfully attempts to tie all these events to 9/11, Rothkopf points out that these disparate events are not necessarily related. They exist independently of 9/11 and would likely have unfolded in much the same way had Bin Laden’s 19 hijackers been intercepted before they reached the airport. By presenting 9/11 as a distraction from any number of equally significant crises, Rich diminishes the true tragedy and effects of the attack. He gives the same weight to Iraq as to Enron, attributing the financial scandal to a Bush-administration “propaganda campaign [that] was no more reality-based than the one that would promote Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.” As bad as Enron was — and the employees who watched their jobs and pensions vaporize will tell you it was very bad indeed — it was not a trillion-dollar war. It was not 4,400 dead American soldiers. If we value everything, we value nothing: ranking 9/11 a “10” on the disaster scale means little if every other unfortunate event, from the Bush tax cuts to the 2008 financial crisis, also merits a 10. Rich devalues the gruesome human cost of 9/11 by labelling what followed “another hijacking.” He writes, “The most lethal of these hijackings was the Bush administration’s repurposing of 9/11 for a war against a country that had not attacked us.” This is the liberal equivalent of insinuating that President Obama is a Muslim and therefore a terrorist. The war in Iraq was wrong, but equating President Bush with a suicide bomber who held a box cutter to the pilot’s throat and flew a plane into the World Trade Center is pure vitriole: rhetoric designed to inflame, not convince.
Rich makes the classic American mistake of seeing the U.S. at the center of the world, as the driver of history. He looks inward, not outward. Afghanistan and Iraq are corrupt ventures not because they caused thousands of civilian casualties or produced a surreal debate over the merits of torture, but because they were presented “as utterly cost-free to a credulous public” which learned to ask, “If we don’t need new taxes to fight two wars, why do we need them for anything?” Is the Tea Party’s distaste for taxes really the worst consequence of 9/11 Rich can find?
Rich seems to believe that all the crises of the last decade can be connected to 9/11 and the mindset it produced. Writing in Foreign Policy, David Rothkopf uses his list of 10 developments “that exceed 9/11 in lasting importance” to demonstrate the danger of Rich’s position. He criticizes the “American legend machine” that will “seek to frame 9/11 as a great event, the definer of an era, when in fact, its greatest defining characteristic was that of a distraction — the Great Distraction — that drew America’s focus and that of many in the world from the greater issues of our time.” Yet, despite his characterization of 9/11 and the subsequent war on terror as a distraction, Rothkopf does not really believe that the 10 events on his list happened because America was distracted. The argument that the heavy-handed response to 9/11 prevented the U.S. from focusing on the truly important stories of the decade — China’s rise, the frailty of the American economy — is not a new one. In part, it is one Rich makes himself when he claims that “we were so caught up in Al Qaeda’s external threat to America that we didn’t pay proper attention” to what he deems “the most consequential event” of the last decade: “the looting of the American economy by those in power in Washington and on Wall Street.” Nor is Rich alone in making his case. Anne Applebaum, writing for Slate, argues that “our worst mistake was one of omission. In making Islamic terrorism our central priority . . . we ignored the economic, environmental, and political concerns of the rest of the globe.”
Where Rothkopf diverges from the rest of the media echo chamber is in his definition of distraction. He believes that the events on his list were caused by greater external forces that had little to do with America. Our distraction didn’t cause these events; it just caused us to ignore them. Because of this distinction, Rothkopf is not nearly as pessimistic as other writers. America’s greatest error lies in its evaluation of the last decade, not necessarily in the actions it took during those ten years. He looks forward, not backward; his purpose is not to assess the damage but to warn against similar blindness in the future. Unlike Applebaum or Rich, Rothkopf considers China’s rise something that happened while the U.S. was distracted, not because the U.S. was distracted. Larger economic and cultural forces are at play here; while America might have responded more intelligently to an emboldened China without the attention-devouring specter of 9/11, no amount of focus could have prevented it. Our tunnel vision is unfortunate but not — yet — deadly.
Likewise, the other events on Rothkopf’s list also happened in spite of 9/11, not because of it. He names the invention of social media and the revolutions of the Arab Spring as two developments whose importance will eventually overshadow that of the war on terror. It is telling that Rothkopf reserves only one slot — the tenth, least important slot — on his list for what he terms “the American response to 9/11.” He writes:
While some might consider America’s overwrought response to 9/11 to be proof of its significance, so much of that response was irrational and more directly related to issues in America’s past (the invasion of Iraq, for example) that it needs to be seen as a thing apart.
By pointing out that “we had been directly and indirectly fighting wars in and around Iraq for years,” Rothkopf suggests that the invasion might have happened even in the absence of such a dramatic trigger as 9/11. Rich and writers of a similar stripe err when they fail to realize that, had 9/11 not occurred, other things would have. A timeline without an Al Qaeda attack is not a timeline with nothing in its place. The neoconservative grudge against Saddam Hussein was a tinderbox waiting for a match. Had 9/11 not provided that match, who’s to say that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld would not have invented a different one? If it is difficult to presume the inevitability of such a major event as the Iraq war, try a smaller one: say, taxes. Rich paints what he sees as the deliberate Republican deception about the cause of the Iraq war (WMDs, Condoleezza Rice’s “mushroom cloud”) as part of a pattern of disingeunousness that includes a manufactured panic over the national debt and the regulatory rollback that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Jonathan Schell at The Nation writes that “the habit of exaggerating or making up threats somehow persisted and spread. A new readiness to manufacture and credit illusion infected public life . . . .” Schell ventures even further afield than Rich by including on his list of manufactured threats not only the supposed dangers of deficit spending but the “epidemic” of voter fraud used to justify voting restrictions imposed by Republican state legislatures to suppress minority turnout. “The provocateur’s strategy of manufacturing a threat in order to respond to it is a familiar one,” he claims, “but it has never played as large a role in American politics as it has since 9/11.”
Really? As early as 1961, Eisenhower was warning against the “military-industrial complex” whose quest for profits had the potential to drag America into endless wars. Cold warriors used the threat of an all-powerful Soviet Union and a metastisizing Communist movement to build a nuclear arsenal and purge “un-American” enemies from politics. Go back even further, some historians suggest, to witness the 18th-century merchant class whipping up public outrage about trampled freedoms and curtailed liberties to convince poorer citizens that they too had a stake in the American Revolution.
There is nothing new under the sun, Ecclesiastes says, and certainly nothing new since 9/11. Even the bitter partisanship that pundits like Rich consider a hallmark of poisonous post-9/11 politics is not as unusual as it seems. One only has to remember the 2000 Florida recount and the introduction of terms like “hanging chad” into the lexicon to see that the red-blue disconnect was only exacerbated, not caused, by 9/11. The greatest stretch of blame-it-all-on-9/11 reasoning is the claim, by Steve Erickson of The American Prospect, that “it’s unimaginable that without 9/11 Barack Obama would have become president.” By Erickson’s logic, a world without 9/11 would have been one in which Hillary Clinton, unhobbled by her vote for the Iraq war, would have easily won the nomination. Furthermore, Obama never would have made the speeches on Iraq and on race that “directly addressed a post-9/11 America that yearned for that brief few weeks when the country felt, as Obama put it, not like a conglomerate of red and blue states but rather like the United States.” I don’t deny that Obama’s themes of hope and change resonated with a public exhausted with the partisanship of the Bush years, but to position 9/11 as the one singular event required for an Obama presidency is to reduce the world to a series of simplistic yes-or-no questions. So many other factors — John McCain’s uninspiring performance, the natural swing of the electoral pendulum after eight years of a Republican presidency — played a role in Obama’s election that is impossible to tease out the effects of a tragedy nearly seven years in the past.
David Rothkopf, at the end of his article, warns against exaggerating the significance of 9/11. Placing it at the center of everything that transpired over the last decade blinds us to truly world-changing developments, or at least narrows our understanding of their causes. Rich would have us believe that what Rothkopof terms “the stagnation of the U.S. and other developed-world economies” has its roots in the poisonous, deceptive politics spawned by 9/11. By accepting such a simplistic and baldly partisan explanation, we are free to ignore the deeper faults in the western economic model. This same willful blindness allows us to pretend that China’s surge is not a natural (and perhaps irreversible) development but the result of a distracted (yet still dominant) America. It is a conclusion easier to stomach than the reality that the U.S. will not be #1 forever.
“So, does all this mean 9/11 was not important?” Rothkopf asks. “Of course not.” He acknowledges that the attack forced major changes in domestic and foreign policy, but cautions that “we cannot allow single isolated events to warp our view of all around them, like historical black holes twisting the fabric of adjacent time and events.” Unfortunately, 9/11 is a black hole that Rich and his likeminded colleagues are all too eager to throw themselves into.
. . . So Well Read. . . 