Remembering 9/11 and What Came After
President George W. Bush with advisors at the President’s Emergency Operations Center, Sept. 11, 2001. (National Archives)
Having just held yet another anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., it is worth asking if the Global War on Terror that followed will become America’s next forgotten war?
A few years ago we made a documentary featuring people who were almost too young to remember 9/11. Their journey of discovery is fascinating and powerful, including some amazing interviews with some never told stories. You can watch the short film here.
One of the people interviewed in the documentary was Steve Bucci a retired Army special forces officer, military assistant to the Secretary of Defense, and a former defense official. So all these years later, we caught up with Steve and asked for his reflections on 9/11 and after.
What is you most powerful memory of 9/11 and after? Frankly, the entire day is still very stark for me. We were hosting a Congressional breakfast for a dozen or so legislators. We saw the first plane hit in NYC, and all said things like, “Wow, what a tragedy.” Or “How could that have happened?” Then we saw the “replay”, which wasn’t a replay, but the second plane. We all immediately realized this was an attack. I was sent into a more secure area (used for classified planning), to try and make some sense of it. After a few minutes we felt vibrations through the building, and felt it “shift”. This was quite amazing for a gigantic building like the Pentagon. I went back to the main office and asked what had happened. “A plane hit our building Sir” was the answer I got. I then asked, “Where is the Boss?” meaning Secretary Rumsfeld. The sergeant said “He went out to the crash site.” That was not what clearly needed to happen, so we went out to get him, and he was hauling a stretcher with a wounded service member on it, at 72 years old. We got him in contact with the President. That was the start of a long day.
Did we win the war on terror? I would have to say “No”, but frankly I don’t think this sort of war was, or is, “winnable” in the normal sense. We were fighting an ideology, not a nation or just Al Qaeda. Early on we saw it as a “Long War” as many experts soon began calling it. We realized that we were in a decades long struggle that would, at best, mitigate the risks and threats to our Nation, but could not eliminate them completely. As Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld said, we weren’t “going to kill our way to victory”, and our enemy did not have finite goals over which we could negotiate. We did the best we could with the knowledge we had. The effort was imperfect.
What was our biggest mistake? In an effort to help the American people “return to normalcy”, President Bush encouraged everyone to go on with life and to not really approach this conflict as a WW II style “Nation in Arms” event. So, the American People kind of left things to the Military, the Intel Community, and to Law Enforcement. The latter was eventually embodied mainly by both the FBI and DHS. Not having the People “enlisted” in the fight (unless they had family members involved), almost guaranteed that they would tire of the conflict. That combined with the reality that the war would not end quickly made it almost impossible to get much momentum in this sort of fight.
What did we get right? The Nation never took out their frustration with the policy (eventually half the population soured on the war) on the kids fighting it. There was no repeat of soldiers returning in uniform and getting spit on as we saw in the Viet Nam War. It showed a great maturation of our Nation and a determination to never abuse a large number of our youth who volunteered to serve the Nation. That was very heartening to me.
What's next? We must remain vigilant to ensure that the AQs, the ISISs, and their ilk are not allowed to surprise us again. This is a huge challenge in a free nation like ours. How do we balance security and liberty? We tried to do that after 9/11, but we still have not gotten it correctly as yet. This has to go beyond politics, and what was a nearly impossible task before, may be unreachable in today’s partisan political climate. I hope I am wrong, but this is an awfully heavy lift.