Can We Ever Never Forget?

Reflections on the Eternal 9/11

Every September 11, America tells itself the same thing: Never Forget.

Twenty-five years later, perhaps it is time to ask a more uncomfortable question. Can we ever never forget? More importantly, what exactly are we supposed to remember?

The controversy surrounding this year's memorial ceremony in New York has again produced the familiar arguments over solemnity, respect and whether public officials behaved appropriately during the reading of the names. Those questions understandably matter to people who lost someone that morning. Their grief belongs to them, and no national reconsideration of September 11 requires taking that away. National remembrance, however, is something different from personal mourning.

After a quarter-century, a nation should be capable of moving beyond mourning toward historical judgment. Instead, every September we return to essentially the same images: the airplane disappearing into the tower, the explosion, the smoke, desperate people running through Manhattan and eventually the buildings collapsing.

I sometimes wonder whether the terrorists are still winning every September 11.

That does not mean that al-Qaeda defeated the United States militarily. It never possessed anything approaching the power necessary to do so. Nineteen terrorists could not conquer America, destroy its economy or overthrow its government. What terrorists can do is provoke their target into doing things to itself. That is one of terrorism's fundamental calculations: a relatively weak organization commits an act spectacular enough to frighten a vastly stronger opponent, hoping that the opponent's reaction will multiply the original attack many times over.

By that measure, we should be willing to examine the complete balance sheet of September 11.

The United States lost 2,977 people in the attacks themselves and subsequently fought America's longest war in Afghanistan. Thousands of American servicemembers died in the wars that followed September 11, while many more returned with physical and psychological wounds. Afghans and Iraqis died in vastly greater numbers. Trillions of dollars were ultimately committed to warfare, reconstruction, homeland security, veterans' care and an enormous counterterrorism apparatus. After twenty years of American involvement in Afghanistan, the Taliban eventually returned to Kabul.

Iraq presents an even more uncomfortable part of the accounting. Saddam Hussein did not conduct the September 11 attacks, yet Iraq became inseparable from America's post-9/11 era. Whatever arguments can be made for or against that war on its own merits, the political atmosphere created by September 11 helped make a military undertaking of that scale possible.

Then there is the bill Americans paid at home. The attacks helped produce the PATRIOT Act, an enormous expansion of surveillance and intelligence authorities, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, increasingly intrusive airport security, watch lists and continuing controversies surrounding FISA and the Fourth Amendment. Some of those measures undoubtedly made the country safer, while others deserve considerably more scrutiny. Determining which was which is precisely the sort of question mature remembrance should encourage.

We should also remember that September 11 did not emerge from nowhere. The World Trade Center had already been attacked in 1993, when terrorists attempted to bring down the towers with a truck bomb beneath the complex. Six people were killed and more than a thousand were injured. Eight years later, terrorists came back to the same target and succeeded on an almost unimaginable scale.

That history should make September 11 not merely a story about villainy and heroism, but a case study in institutional learning. We should examine the warnings that existed, which were recognized and which were ignored, the assumptions that failed, the performance of emergency communications and the procedures that either saved lives or unnecessarily endangered them. Asking those questions honors the dead at least as much as repeatedly showing the moment of their deaths.

There is another group that deserves a larger place in the remembrance: the young Americans sent afterward to Afghanistan and Iraq. Many were children when the towers fell. They grew up under the shadow of that morning, enlisted, deployed repeatedly and sometimes came home missing limbs, carrying traumatic injuries or not coming home at all. If September 11 created a national obligation to remember its victims, surely some portion of that obligation extends to the people America subsequently sent halfway around the world in response to it.

Our historical accounting cannot end at America's borders either. Large numbers of Afghans and Iraqis were killed during the wars that followed, while millions more experienced displacement, injury, economic devastation and political upheaval. Acknowledging those consequences does not diminish the Americans murdered on September 11. It recognizes something that nations should understand particularly well: actions have consequences, including actions undertaken by grieving and frightened societies.

That is why the ritual of endlessly replaying September 11 deserves reconsideration. Imagine the attack from the perspective of the terrorists who conceived it. They sought a spectacular image demonstrating America's vulnerability. Twenty-five years later, much of the world still sees precisely the images they created: airplanes striking buildings, enormous fireballs erupting over Manhattan, towers burning and finally collapsing into the streets below. Every anniversary gives those images another global audience.

That is an extraordinary afterlife for a terrorist operation.

Perhaps our commemorations should increasingly show something else. We could show the Pentagon repaired, lower Manhattan rebuilt and the new World Trade Center standing over New York. We could tell the stories of firefighters who survived and spent careers training the next generation, children who lost parents but nevertheless built families and lives of their own, and wounded veterans who returned home to work, raise children and lead communities. The central image of September 11 need not forever be America under attack. It could increasingly become America continuing afterward.

Because the most devastating message America could send to the men who planned September 11 is not an endlessly repeated image of what they managed to destroy. It is evidence of what they failed to destroy.

Once we have done that, however, we should undertake something considerably harder and open the books. Twenty-five years provides enough historical distance to conduct a serious national accounting of September 11 and everything done in its name. We should determine which security measures worked and which did not, which emergency-response lessons remain relevant, which surveillance powers remain necessary and which supposedly temporary measures quietly became permanent. We should examine what twenty years in Afghanistan accomplished, what lessons should be learned from Iraq, what obligations remain toward the servicemembers who fought those wars and how we should understand the consequences suffered by civilians caught inside them.

Most importantly, Americans should ask what would happen if another terrorist organization succeeded tomorrow in killing several thousand people. Could another relatively small group once again frighten a nation of more than 300 million into reorganizing its government, surrendering portions of its privacy, spending trillions of dollars and fighting wars lasting decades? If the answer is yes, that may be the most important unfinished lesson of September 11.

None of this requires forgetting the people who died. Their names should be read, the bells should be rung and their families should be free to gather at Ground Zero for as many generations as they wish. Personal grief has no expiration date. But national remembrance should eventually become something more demanding than national mourning.

"Never Forget" was an understandable promise made by a traumatized country in 2001. Twenty-five years later, perhaps that promise needs to mature. Remembering September 11 should mean remembering the people who died and those who ran toward the buildings, but it should also mean remembering the warnings that were missed, the Americans sent to fight, the civilians caught in the resulting wars, the liberties surrendered, the mistakes made, the security measures that genuinely worked and, perhaps above all, the fact that America survived.

We should also remember what terrorism actually attempts to accomplish. Terrorists rarely possess the conventional power to destroy a country like the United States themselves. Their greater opportunity is to frighten that country into imposing costs upon itself that the terrorists could never hope to inflict directly.

If every September 11 we allow nineteen dead terrorists to frighten us all over again, we may indeed have remembered them for far too long while forgetting one of the most important lessons of the attack.

Never Forget should never have meant never move forward.