5, less than a month after the attacks, Robert Stevens, a sixty-three-year-old photo editor of the Boca Raton, Florida, tabloid, the Sun, inhaled anthrax spores after opening his mail. Targeting a newspaper, of course, also had the chilling effect of putting all journalists on alert and making them personally invested in the story. By mid-November, five people were dead or dying of anthrax, dozens injured. Senators and Supreme Court justices were also targeted. Everyone was on edge. The FBI began tracking leads from Washington to Florida and the fear grew that if al Qaeda had anthrax maybe they had smallpox too, or plans to poison the water supply. Maybe nuclear weapons? It would take a multi-million-dollar investigation and nearly seven years for the FBI to dismiss an al Qaeda connection to the anthrax and conclude that the likely perpetrator was an army scientist named Bruce Edwards Ivins, a troubled doctor who had helped develop an anthrax vaccine and had even been advising the FBI in its investigation. Dr. Ivins had been tormented by alcohol and mental illness and took his own life in 2008 when the FBI turned its focus on him.
Fear is a powerful motivator that our brains process in strange ways. We know that obesity and smoking are killers, but it’s the idea that a murderer is lurking in the basement or under our bed that scares us. How often are nervous flyers told that they are more likely to die in an accident driving to the airport than flying? But knowing the statistics doesn’t stop their palms from sweating during takeoff. Even after 9/11, the risk of being struck by lightning was greater than dying in a terrorist attack in North America. But we had heard f-16s soar across Manhattan, and that was the thunder that made us shudder.
If you didn’t feel afraid instinctively, then you were told you should. In fact we were bombarded with fear, warned to be in a constant state of readiness and to heed the colour-coded threat level. It was usually red (severe risk), sometimes on good days maybe orange (high risk). If you see a red flag on Hawaii’s North Shore you probably don’t go swimming. A black weather flag at a military base means it’s not the smartest idea to run a marathon at noon. But how do you live with severe risk when you don’t know what the risk is?
Fear explained the billions spent on airport security even though there is no way to plug all the holes. The box cutters used on 9/11 caused airlines to give us plastic cutlery on flights. Shoe bomber Richard Reid caused us to take off our footwear. In 2006, after British police thwarted a liquid bomb plot, water bottles were deemed dangerous. After the so-called underwear bomber failed to bring down a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day 2009, Canadian passengers flying to the United States had to put their hands in their pockets, rub them around and extend their palms for an explosives test. Minutes before undergoing this routine at Toronto’s Pearson Airport in February 2010, I had stood in a customs line that snaked out the door to the check-in counters. No one had passed through security yet or checked their luggage. A bomb detonated there could have killed hundreds.
Fear helps explain why there was little debate over Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act or the sweeping October 2001 U.S. Patriot Act that undermined decades of civil rights protections. It had passed 96 to 1. Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold was the one. “This was not, in my view, the finest hour for the United States Senate,” he told Congress. “The debate on a bill that may have the most far-reaching consequences on civil liberties of the American people in a generation was a non-debate. The merits took a back seat to the deal.” He was branded a traitor, which didn’t deter him from later trying to censure Bush for wiretapping American citizens without court approval, from voting against the Iraq war or from becoming the first senator to call for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
“The tragic events of September 11, 2001, changed more than Manhattan’s skyline; it profoundly altered our political and legal landscape as well,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote in his bestseller Kingdom of Fear. “Anyone who witnessed the desecration of those buildings and the heart-wrenching loss of life, who didn’t want to run out and rip someone a new asshole, doesn’t deserve the freedoms we still enjoy. However, anybody who thinks for one moment that giving up our freedoms is any way to preserve or protect those freedoms, is even more foolhardy.”
And that’s the thing. Everyone knows that fear can be irrational but many just resorted to the mantra “better safe than sorry.”
But are we safer?
In April 2006, a National Intelligence Estimate said the United States wasn’t. According to declassified portions of the report, the terrorist threat was in fact greater than it had been on September 10, 2001. This wasn’t the bleeding-heart-socialist-civil-rights-activists-American-Civil-Liberties-Union-leftist-media talking. This was an NIE, a federal government document written by the National Intelligence Council, approved by the Director of National Intelligence and based on raw, uncensored information collected by the sixteen American intelligence agencies. Of course, as the name states, the reports are “estimates.” But they are considered authoritative assessments and while typically bureaucratic or measured in tone, this one was blunt. Radical Islamic movements that aligned themselves with al Qaeda had not been quashed, but had metastasized and spread around the world. The report laid out the factors that were fuelling the movement: fear of Western domination leading to anger, humiliation and a sense of powerlessness when coupled with entrenched grievances such as corruption and injustice; the faulty intelligence that led to the Iraq war; the slow pace of economic, social and political reform in Muslim nations; and the pervasive anti-U.S. sentiment among Muslims and exploited by jihadists.
Two of the authors of a report issued by the 9/11 Commission (an independent, bipartisan committee created by congressional legislation to investigate the attacks) asked in a Washington Post editorial in 2007 how it was possible that the threat could remain so dire when billions had been spent, new laws enacted, wars fought.
“We face a rising tide of radicalization and rage in the Muslim world—a trend to which our own actions have contributed. The enduring threat is not Osama bin Laden but young Muslims with no jobs and no hope, who are angry with their own governments and increasingly see the United States as an enemy of Islam,” wrote the former commission chair Thomas H. Kean, and vice chair Lee H. Hamilton.
Kean and Hamilton wrote that the West had lost the struggle of ideas.
“We have not been persuasive in enlisting the energy and sympathy of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims against the extremist threat. That is not because of who we are: Polling data consistently show strong support in the Muslim world for American values, including our political system and respect for human rights, liberty and equality. Rather, U.S. policy choices have undermined support.” Military is essential, they wrote. “But if the only tool is a hammer, pretty soon every problem looks like a nail.”
Fear drove so much of what happened after 9/11, and many political leaders were the masters of stoking it. The world was suddenly viewed only through the terrorism prism. There was no middle ground. As Bush famously said on September 20, 2001, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
“If you lose where you’re going, you look back to where you’ve been.”
TRADITIONAL SOMALI SAYING
THERE MAY BE no country more cursed than Somalia, the archetypal failed state. Which is strange when you think that unlike so many other war-torn nations, Somalis share one language, religion, ethnicity and culture.
Somalia went into free fall in 1991 when warring clans deposed the military dictatorship of Mohamed Siad Barre and the incendiary fighting nurtured an entire generation on violence and poverty. Say Somalia and most think Black Hawk Down, three words that sum up the 1993 failed U.S. intervention that ingrained an image of a savage Somalia into the Western consciousness.
The U.S. Special Forces mission was an attempt to
