Brian M Downing
The September 11 attacks brought overwhelming unity to the American people. Comparisons were drawn to the spirit that followed Pearl Harbor and led to determined campaigns in Europe and the Pacific. Victory came in less than four years.
The al Qaeda attacks killed three thousand Americans and affected everyone. The nation determined to exact vengeance and ensure against recurrence. Interminable wars followed. Today, however, America is more deeply divided than ever, probably irreversibly so.
Mobilization and sacrifice
After Pearl Harbor, millions of men and women entered the military. Millions more worked in war industries, purchased bonds, took part in scrap drives, waited in line for rationed goods, and wrote letters to GIs unknown to them. Everyone was involved.
The response to al Qaeda required no expansion of the military, which was already far larger than it was in 1941. There was no conscription, rationing, or shortages. Sacrifice was limited to those in the military and their families. Most Americans knew no one in uniform and hadn’t since Vietnam. The president told Americans that their part was spending money and keeping the economy going.
Wars, then and now
One year into the Second World War, offensive operations had begun in the South Pacific and North Africa. Progress came swift and relentlessly. Snafus there were, but Imperial Japan and the Third Reich were on the defensive.
The post-9/11 wars have been based on faulty assumptions and carried through by ill-qualified leaders.
The 2001-02 campaign in Afghanistan unfolded extraordinarily rapidly. The Taliban fled in disarray and Kabul fell. Nonetheless, the campaign was based on wrath, overweening confidence, and poor intelligence. The Taliban reconstituted itself and bogged us down for the last nineteen years – longer than our conflicts in both world wars, Korea, and Vietnam combined.
The 2003 Iraq war was also based on poor intelligence. Some of it was manipulated and cherry picked by the administration to strengthen its case for war. An insurgency and al Qaeda influx followed. Iraq is in chaos and Islamist militancy persists.
National mobilization
Would anything have been different had Washington conscripted young people and levied wartime taxes in the heady months after September 11? The post-Vietnam generals wanted future conflicts to entail national engagement and spread the costs, financial and human, more evenly across the social system.
But those generals, and the sociologists and politicians who supported national engagement in war, grew up in a cohesive nation. They did not see the enduring disintegrative effects of the sixties and the coalescence of a hyper-individualistic society inimitable to national served and sacrifice.
Support for the war and national cohesion would not have been any higher. Indeed, opposition would have been higher and more jarring.
Large parts of the draft pool, up and down the social system, would refuse induction, pose persistent disciplinary troubles, or underperform volunteer counterparts. The military would have to struggle to perform its mission, even at home.
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The unity of the months after 9/11 was powerful, moving, but short-lived. It was our Indian Summer – a welcome but deceptive interlude between the polarization and anomie of the post-Vietnam era and the violence and chaos of today.
© 2020 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who’s written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Thanks as ever to Susan Ganosellis.