The Unfinished Business of 9/11

When I think of, and back to 9/11, I have many swirling thoughts, but what sticks with me still is a sense of lingering bitterness over the many unsettled bills left on the table that day. Most of all, 9/11 represents the single greatest institutional failure in the history of our government to perform its most basic responsibility: to protect us from foreign foes.

In the movie Enemy at the Gates, Nikita Khruschev sits down with the Soviet general responsible for the impending loss of Stalingrad to the Germans. “I have to report this to the Boss,” he says, referring to Joe Stalin. He then lays a handgun on the table in front of the general and says, “Perhaps you’d prefer to avoid the red tape.” Khruschev rises and leaves, and as we see him making his way down the hall we hear a single shot followed by a dull thud.

What we know of the operation of the government in the days following that Tuesday morning with impossibly clear skies is dwarfed by the amount we do not know. But we do know that not a single senior government official, from the directors of the CIA and FBI, to the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs, down to many of the various field and station heads, was forced to resign, court-martialed, or publicly held to account for their failure. I am sure some careers ended a few years earlier than planned, and some hoped-for promotions to Headquarters turned into dead-end postings in Idaho, but that seems to be the worst of it. During the 9/11 commission investigation, Sandy Berger, National Security Adviser to Bill Clinton, was caught stuffing documents down his pants like a shoplifter slipping iPods up his shirt, for which he was let off with a few late-night talk show jokes at his expense.

Today, the Right focuses on defending George W. Bush’s handling of the aftermath, while the Left tries to bleach history of their part in it all, from the Clinton administration’s failure to comprehend and deal with Bin Laden in the mid-90s, to congressional Democrats’ near-total agreement with the pre-war assessment of Iraq’s WMD capabilities. The resulting partisan food fight ensures that the true failure–that of the bipartisan and permanent governing class–receives no attention except from the fever swamps.

If the past decade has taught us anything, it is that the highest echelons of our society suffer from a conspicuous lack of accountability. 3,000 Americans were murdered by two dozen thugs sent from the most backward corner of the planet, and not one national security official was forced to resign in disgrace. Millions of lower- and middle-class people are paying for hundreds of billions of bailouts, while Richard Fuld, under whose leadership Lehman Brothers collapsed, was compelled into retirement in his early 60s with nothing to fall back on but the change in his couch and some tens of millions in his personal portfolio. As was said of the dissolute House of Bourbon upon its restoration in France, “they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”