Beyond Bin Laden

The World After Bin Laden
 
Jon Meacham
 
To begin at the beginning: It was a good day for flying, that bright blue early autumn morning a decade ago. American Airlines Flight 11, nonstop from Boston to Los Angeles, took off at 7:59 a.m. Eastern time. A passenger named Mohamed Atta was in business class, in seat 8D. Within fifteen minutes, the jet had reached twenty-six thousand feet. About sixteen seconds later, Air Traffic Control in Boston issued a routine directive to the pilots to head up to thirty-five thousand feet.
 
No one replied. Flight 11 had gone dark.
 
Reports of what happened between 8:14 and 8:46, painstakingly reconstructed by the 9/11 Commission, come from flight attendants who called the ground as the hijacking unfolded. There were stabbings and the spraying of Mace; the taking of the cockpit; and Atta’s assumption of the controls. As the plane headed toward New York, officials on the ground thought the hijackers might be bound for Kennedy Airport. The rest of the story is in the words of Madeline "Amy" Sweeney, one of the flight attendants still on a phone line: "Something is wrong. We are in a rapid descent … we are all over the place." It was about 8:44. "We are flying low. We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low." A pause, then: "Oh my God we are way too low." American Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46:40, and the world changed.
 
Oh my God we are way too low: Amy Sweeney’s words marked the opening chapter of a new era in American life, one in which innocents found themselves transformed into combatants by the fiat of a faraway fanatic and his followers. That fanatic—the rich, elusive embodiment of ancient evil in a new century, the man who made a living hell of Sweeney’s final moments on Tuesday, September 11, 2001—met his own end on Sunday, May 1, 2011, when American military forces, in a nighttime raid, killed him in a walled compound at the end of a dirt road thirty-five miles from the capital of Pakistan. Osama bin Laden, a killer in his early fifties who seemed somehow ageless, was shot in the head and buried at sea. Amy Sweeney and the roughly three thousand victims of 9/11—as well as the victims of Bin Laden’s other attacks, from East Africa to Yemen—had been avenged.
 
Let philosophers debate whether the American operation was the means of justice or of vengeance; such questions are interesting but not, in my view, urgent. Bin Laden declared war on the West, especially on America, and war was what he got. He claimed he was doing so in the name of Allah. The extreme reading of Islam that provided his rhetoric and his ethos, however, was secondary to the more elemental force that drove him: the will to power. He chose this fight. He got it, and now, presumably, he is discovering the extent of the accuracy of his vision of the world beyond this one. I doubt he is finding the bliss of the martyr.
 
For those of us still among the living, the death of Bin Laden is welcome and long overdue. The failure to capture or kill him sooner flummoxed three presidential administrations, from Clinton to Obama. In retrospect (that wondrous thing), we can see how Bin Laden moved from smaller-scale bombings, especially the 1998 attacks on American embassies in Africa, to what Al Qaeda called the "spectacular" misery of 9/11. From Langley to Tora Bora to a thousand unknown points in between, men and women acting for our collective security have lived and fought and died to disrupt Al Qaeda, struggling in a common cause that was—is, come to that—all too easy to put out of mind. This is their hour.
 
It is fashionable in some foreign-policy circles to minimize Bin Laden’s and Al Qaeda’s significance. The argument—usually put quietly, in private, with a kind of world-weariness—is that terrorism does not represent an existential threat to the United States, and that the wars after 9/11 have vastly distorted our policies and priorities. In sum, this view holds that George W. Bush’s post-9/11 vision of the world—a vision which shapes the reality his successor faces—is fundamentally misguided. For adherents of this school, it follows that Bin Laden’s death is thought of as symbolic and, in a phrase that grew trite on television before the sun rose in the western United States on Monday morning, May 2, as a "morale boost" for the American psyche.
 
It is, however, more than that. Yes, Al Qaeda is decentralized, and terrorists could strike from nearly anywhere under the banner of some entity about which we know nothing at the moment. As for the boosted psyche, moments of political and communal feeling, both good and bad, come and go. President Obama’s poll numbers will rise, and they will fall.
 
But radical Islamic terrorism—and radical Islam itself—matters. It may not threaten the existence of the United States, but it endangers the existence of those who might be killed by its attacks, and is a force in nuclear nations such as Pakistan that are riven by radicalism. The death of Bin Laden cannot help but have a beneficial effect on our struggle against extremists, even if those extremists are driven to attempt vengeance. It underscores a capacity for persistence in the American character—a character often caricatured by its enemies as too fat and happy and decadent to focus on any one thing for very long.
 
Of course, to be honest, sustained public attention is not an overly abundant American virtue. That is why an hour like this one is so important. There are moments in the life of a nation, and of the world, which force an examination of familiar assumptions and offer a largely sclerotic political culture an opportunity to adjust course.
 
Which brings us to this book. The death of Bin Laden is an occasion to assess where we have been and where we are going. Two wars were begun in the shadow of Bin Laden’s attacks, one in Afghanistan, the other in Iraq; the former drags on interminably. Our relations with Pakistan are such that the White House did not inform its government before the assault on Bin Laden’s compound. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, chemical, biological—remains disturbing and maddeningly uncontrollable. The events of the Arab Spring give hope; Muammar Gaddafi’s durability in Libya gives pause.
 
In the essays that follow, the contributors look ahead, beyond emotion and conventional wisdom, to suggest what the post–Bin Laden chapter in American life may be like. And it makes sense to think in terms of chapters, not wholly different stories, for what the government christened the Global War on Terror in the wake of 9/11 can never truly end. Even the "long twilight struggle" of the Cold War—the phrase is John F. Kennedy’s—reached a conclusion with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union under George H. W. Bush.
 
Unlike Soviet Communism, terrorism will be with us always. Yet everything is a matter of degree. It would be progress indeed if terror could occupy the same place in our national priorities and imagination as it did in the 1970s and 1980s—a reality, but not a consuming one. This may not be possible, but Bin Laden’s death gives us at least a moment to ponder these kinds of scenarios.
 
Among the most exciting of such possibilities is that the killing of Bin Laden will give President Obama the political room to underscore issues of investment that are not traditionally thought of in national-security terms. The national challenges we face are far from limited to the threat of violence by radical Islamists. From education to infrastructure to debt, Americans have much to do, and the distinction between domestic concerns and foreign ones is largely false. No great military power has remained so in the absence of economic power. To take just one example: Our dependence on foreign oil has long distorted our foreign policy. Does anyone seriously think American leaders would care as much about the Middle East if our economy were not inextricably linked to the energy produced and sold there? More self-sufficiency in that sector alone would create a more secure nation.
 
As Bismarck remarked, politics is the art of the possible. Not the perfect, and sometimes not even the remotely desirable, but the possible. The attacks of September 11 opened up a world of possibilities for the leadership of George W. Bush, and what he did with those possibilities is now in the hands of history. President Obama, however, continues to live amid the obligations of what Martin Luther King, Jr. called, in a favorite Obama quotation, "the fierce urgency of now.”
 
What he—what we—choose to do with that commission will determine the shape of the next decade, and perhaps longer. Americans like to look to tomorrow; it’s the frontier spirit in us, the restlessness that brought so many to the New World from the Old. But without remembering yesterday, we risk foreclosing learning the lessons of even the very recent past. For Americans in the nineteenth century, slavery and the cataclysm of the Civil War were shaping events; in the middle of the twentieth century there was Munich and Pearl Harbor and then Vietnam; now there is 9/11 and its fallout, not least the Iraq War.
 
Our central yesterday remains that now-distant Tuesday in 2001. It is the day that has affected every subsequent day, from Manhattan to Kabul to Baghdad to Islamabad. At the heart of the story of that day are people like Peter Hanson, a passenger on United Airlines Flight 175, the plane that hit the South Tower nearly twenty minutes after Amy Sweeney’s American Airlines jet struck the North Tower. In a call to his father, Lee, seconds before the end, Peter said: "It’s getting bad, Dad—A stewardess was stabbed.… It’s getting very bad on the plane.… I think we are going down.… Don’t worry, Dad—If it happens, it’ll be very fast—My God, my God.”
 
It did happen. Now as then, the country needs to fight to keep others from suffering the same fate, and fight to become the best country we can be. Hokey? Maybe. But it has the virtue of being true.
 
Jon Meacham, executive editor at Random House, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House and the New York Times bestsellers Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship and American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation. He lives in New York City with his wife and children.