9/11 Changed Everything
My intemperate thought for the day:
If 9/11 changed how you think about foreign policy, you weren’t thinking very hard about foreign policy beforehand.
If you’d asked me on September 10th, 2001, what the gravest threat to America’s safety was, I’d have told you al-Qaeda. Duh. Al-Qaeda had attacked Americans abroad at least three times in the 1990’s. A good friend of my family visited Kenya and Tanzania the same month in 1998 when the embassies were bombed, and had been IN both embassies a week before it happened. Bin Laden was very clear about his desire to attack United States civilians. A plot by associates of bin Laden to bomb LAX airport was foiled in 1999.
So on September 10, I didn’t have a “September 10 mentality". The following morning was absolutely horrible (I was living in New Jersey at the time), but other than a few FAA regulations, it didn’t change any of my ideas about counterterror policy. Al-Qaeda was still the biggest threat.
The people with a “September 10 mentality” are the people who think we have to fight terrorism by knocking over nation-states with tangential connections to terrorism. Oddly enough, those are the same people accusing people like me of having such a mentality.
Al-Qaeda was our gravest threat on 9/10. Al-Qaeda was our gravest threat on 9/12. 9/11 changed nothing.