Commentary: Have the terrorists won, 24 years after 9/11?
A history professor recalls his first lecture following the September 11, 2001 attacks and argues that America's response ultimately served the attackers' aims.
An American history professor writes that on September 11, 2001, while teaching one of his earliest classes at Yale University, he told students the attacks should be understood as a provocation in the classical sense. He explains that the secret services of the Russian Empire, and later the Soviet Union, had perfected the technique of making adversaries act according to the attacker's wishes while believing they were acting on their own initiative. According to him, after such horrific events, the suffering itself is not the main point — the real goal of the attackers is to push victims into a state of mind that leads them to inflict even greater harm on themselves.
A historical parallel
The professor notes that terrorist attacks are nothing new throughout history, but the true test lies in how a society responds afterward. He argues that genuine freedom is found not in preventing every terrible event, but in the choice of how to react to it.
Criticism of the US response
The author argues that the American reaction to the 2001 attacks was exactly what the terrorists wanted — and arguably exceeded their expectations, making the world worse for both Americans and everyone else. He states that the logical response should have been to move away from fossil fuels, which would have reduced US entanglement in Middle Eastern affairs, allowed timely action against global warming, and prevented the consolidation of a hydrocarbon-based oligarchy under Russian President Vladimir Putin. Instead, then-President George W. Bush, heir to an oil business family, showed no interest in pursuing safer energy sources, claiming the terrorists attacked because they "hate our freedoms" — while the US government subsequently restricted its own citizens' freedoms.
