Year 20
10th September 2021
Reading the twentieth-anniversary commemorations of 9/11 that have filled our prestige newspapers and magazines in recent days, it might seem as if Krauthammer was describing not only another time but another country. Those pieces tell an altogether different story: not of pride and resilience but of guilt, pathos, regret, and exhaustion. The reckless, slapdash, and deadly American withdrawal from Afghanistan has only thickened the funereal atmosphere. That “bedrock America” of courage and grit? It is obscured behind a fog of self-loathing.
For example: “After 9/11, the U.S. Got Almost Everything Wrong,” says one headline in the Atlantic. “9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed,” reads the title of an essay in the Washington Post. “Winning Ugly” is the name of an article in Foreign Affairs. A headline in the Spectator (U.K.) asks, “Is America still worth fighting for?” (The implied answer is no.) New York magazine, of all places, is chockablock with hot takes arguing that the war on terrorism wasn’t worth it: “America’s greatest existential threat wasn’t terrorism”; “The case for Iraqi reparations”; “Bin Laden Won.” The headline of an opinion column in the Washington Post: “We best remember 9/11 by moving beyond it.”