Garrett M. Graff: On 9/11, luck meant everything

Scared and angry, I was roused by President George W. Bush’s speech to a joint session of Congress a few days later, in which he confidently declared, “Our War on Terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” He further defined the nature of the conflict by saying, “Americans are asking, ‘Why do they hate us?’ They hate what we see right here in this chamber—a democratically elected government.” To have this unfathomable event framed in a way that fit neatly into the American narrative that I’d grown up with in the 1980s and ’90s was reassuring. After a decade defined by the triviality of Bill Clinton’s impeachment and the absence of a sense of mission, America had a new national purpose on par with the Cold War—another generational effort to make the world safe for democracy. I moved down to Washington, D.C., to be a part of that effort, in whatever way I could.

I got a job as a speechwriter for former Representative Lee Hamilton, a prototypical Washington wise man who had served in Congress for 34 years and ran the Woodrow Wilson Center, a think tank that doubled as the nation’s official memorial to our 28th president. Every day, I’d go to work in the Ronald Reagan Building, where a slab of the Berlin Wall reminded visitors of the arc of American triumph: from our origin as a superpower after Wilson’s victory in World War I through the collapse of Soviet communism, which made America the world’s only superpower—an epoch that still seemed to be in its early phase as our military toppled regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Hamilton was appointed vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, so for two years, my life and work focused on the attacks that had compelled me to move to Washington. One of the tasks that Hamilton assigned me was to carefully review all of Osama bin Laden’s fatwas, and to examine al-Qaeda’s broader motivations. After reading bin Laden’s own words and studying the lives of the hijackers, I could no longer so easily square their motivations with what Bush had said after 9/11. The people who had attacked us didn’t seem focused on their hatred of America’s “democratically elected government.” What they hated was American foreign policy. What they sought was the overthrow of their own governments—chiefly, that of Saudi Arabia, where bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers came from, and that of Egypt, where the plot’s ringleader, Mohamed Atta, came from.

As the 9/11 Commission worked on issuing its report, the Iraq War was unraveling into an unmitigated disaster. The dissolution of the Iraqi army and state punctured my faith in American competence. The horror of Abu Ghraib punctured my sense of America’s moral authority. The obvious strategic victory for Iran punctured my confidence in the judgment of the national-security establishment. The reframing of the war as an effort to bring democracy to the Iraqi people punctured my trust in the words spoken by my leaders. The rhetoric that was once rousing now seemed cynical, a post facto justification for a catastrophic mistake. Democracy was being debased, not promoted.