Twelve years ago today, when al-Qaida attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, there were Americans who summoned incredible courage and refused to be terrorized. New York City firefighters ran up the stairwells of burning skyscrapers. Flight 93 passengers crashed their own airplane to stop the hijackers. Patriotic men and women all over America resolved to enlist in the armed forces, knowing only that their country had been attacked and needed to be defended.
Those heroes of Sept. 11, 2001, ought to be remembered every year on its anniversary, not only because so many sacrificed their lives, but also because they set a worthy example: reacting to the worst of times with the best of what was inside them, they showed their countrymen that, while al-Qaida may occasionally succeed in attacking us, they cannot control how we react to their attacks.
We control our response.
And when we refuse to be terrorized, we deprive terrorists of their most potent weapon.
Ask David Kilcullen, a former Australian army officer who went on to advise the Pentagon on counterterrorism. Add up everyone al-Qaida killed or is likely to kill, and they're far from an existential threat, he explained in an interview with the Atlantic. But, like the anarchists who sparked World War I by killing the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, al-Qaida's power is magnified when they can spark an imprudent reaction from a superpower like the United States. “It is not the people al-Qaida might kill that is the threat,” Kilcullen concluded. “Our reaction is what can cause the damage. It's al-Qaida plus our response.”
The Iraq war is an instructive example.
The 9/11 attacks killed almost 3,000 people, and cost perhaps $200 billion in cleanup costs and economic impacts. One of America's responses to 9/11, the Iraq war, was undertaken with the understanding that it would make us safer in a post-9/11 world. But the war cost almost 5,000 American lives; tens of thousands lost limbs or suffered post-traumatic stress disorder; and the monetary cost alone will ultimately be more than $2 trillion.
Was invading and attempting to rebuild a faraway country really the most effective way to spend $2 trillion? Not in a world where our borders remain unsecured, a pandemic flu could kill millions, and 40,000 people die in car crashes each year. But 9/11 scared so many of us so much that, for awhile, we stopped assessing risk rationally anytime the word terrorism was invoked.
We've paid dearly in lost liberties, too.
In the name of preventing another 9/11, the government is spying on the private communications of millions of innocent Americans, expanding the Transportation Security Agency beyond airports to sports stadiums and truck stops, and otherwise growing the national security state.
Going forward, Americans should react to terrorism more circumspectly, assess risk more rationally, and be more insistent about protecting core constitutional liberties.
Doing so will require courage, but not nearly so much as running up the stairs of a burning building or deliberately crashing a plane in the Pennsylvania countryside.
As Jim Manzi put it in National Review, “Suppose we had a 9/11-level attack with 3,000 casualties per year, every year. Each person reading this would face a probability of death from terrorism of about 0.001 percent each year. A Republic demands courage – not foolhardy and unsustainable ‘principle at all costs,' but reasoned courage – from its citizens.” The heroes of 9/11 showed courage in the face of an extraordinarily frightening attack, and denied al-Qaida the ability to terrorize them. Let's commemorate their bravery by better following the example that they set.
Register opinion columnist Conor Friedersdorf also is a staff writer for the Atlantic.