In his column of Sept. 17, 2001, conservative columnist Robert Novak reported on the plans of the Washington establishment, including this quote from a Republican senator: “We’re going to bomb Afghanistan into a parking lot.”
Novak warned that this wouldn’t accomplish what America needed to accomplish. “The CIA, in its present state, is viewed by its Capitol Hill overseers as incapable of targeting bin Laden,” Novak reported.
Sure enough, we did not catch bin Laden in Afghanistan. It took another 10 years and three CIA directors before we finally caught up with him in Pakistan.
Novak, who would hire me as a staff reporter about three months later, also noted that the more hawkish elements of the American Right were already calling for a broad regime change. Bill Bennett, for instance, had suggested that the U.S. ought to follow an Afghanistan invasion with attacks on Syria, Iran, Libya, and Iraq.
“An American attack on some of those countries,” Novak remarked, “would be a geopolitical disaster.”
Novak’s column, written days after 9/11, became a central exhibit in David Frum’s case in National Review that Bob Novak was an “Unpatriotic Conservative.” The central theme of the piece, published on the eve of the Iraq War, was that the people opposing President George W. Bush’s intervention really just hated their country.
As we stand amid a pandemic defined by massive, sudden, emotionally charged government actions and look back 20 years ago to the massive, sudden, emotionally charged actions of the Bush administration and Congress, it is worth remembering that back then, there were people who resisted government overreaction and were excoriated for it.
It’s easy to read the media today and assume there was uniformity behind the post-9/11 errors. But actually, some of us opposed the creation of the Transportation Security Administration. Some of us opposed the expansion of domestic surveillance. Some of us warned about the difficulty of nation-building. Some of us, even on the Right, opposed the Iraq War.
For those crimes, we were sometimes called “unpatriotic” and even antisemitic. We were warned, when we asked for more evidence that the proposed interventions were necessary, that the proof would come in the form of a “mushroom cloud.”
As a result, many of us have been unimpressed over the last 18 months when told that questioning the government’s massive, unprecedented, disruptive interventions would result in untold deaths. Those of us who opposed unreasonable closures, who questioned the need for mask mandates, who resisted government intrusions into our private institutions, were called killers. We were told we would be responsible for untold deaths.
The analogy between the post-9/11 mania and the coronavirus mania is imperfect, of course. Saddam Hussein killed nobody with his nonexistent WMDs. Al Qaeda’s body count over 20 years is a drop in the bucket compared to COVID-19’s body count. But in certain regards, the analogy works perfectly.
“Students will die” if schools are reopened, teachers warned. This captured two totally false, WMD-like storylines: First, that COVID-19 would be a mass murderer of children, and second, that opening schools was dangerous.
Another parallel between the pandemic response and the 9/11 response: The interventions have proven less effective and more costly than promised. School closures, banning outdoor youth sports, closing swimming pools, the costly Clorox theater, all have been pointless and have harmed young people and all of society.
Going forward, the most important parallel might be the lack of an end date. By naming the post-9/11 response the “War on Terror,” the Bush administration created license for permanent war, permanent surveillance, and permanent suspension of civil liberties.
It’s the same with this virus. Like the flu and like terror, the coronavirus will be with us until the end of the world. There will always be excuses for draconian quarantine rules, for mask mandates, for new vaccine mandates, and so on. To borrow a phrase: We’re in a forever pandemic.
