1861, 1941, 2001

Following excerpts are taken from George Packer's "Inertia, Not Progress Defines the Decade After 9/11." The New Yorker. 12 Sept. 2011.

"Of the three attacks that have provoked the United States into a major war—in 1861, 1941, and 2001—only one came as a complete surprise. Fort Sumter had been under siege for months when, just before daybreak on April 12, 1861, Confederate batteries around Charleston Harbor, after giving an hour’s notice, opened fire on the Federal position. The Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, was a violent shock, but only in the nature and extent of the destruction: by then, most Americans had come to believe that the country would be dragged into the global war with Fascism one way or another, though their eyes were fixed on Europe, not the Pacific.

"The attacks of 9/11 were the biggest surprise in American history, and for the past ten years we haven’t stopped being surprised. The war on terror has had no discernible trajectory, and, unlike other military conflicts, it’s almost impossible to define victory.

"Adam Goodheart’s new book, '1861: The Civil War Awakening,' shows that the start of the conflict was accompanied, in what was left of the Union, by a revolutionary surge of energy among young people, who saw the dramatic events of that year in terms of the ideals of 1776: 'the overdue effort to sort out the double legacy of America’s founders: the uneasy marriage of the Declaration’s inspired ideals with the Constitution’s ingenious expedients.'
Pearl Harbor was similarly clarifying. It put an instant end to the isolationism that had kept American foreign policy in a chokehold for two decades. In the White House on the night of December 7th, Franklin Roosevelt’s Navy Secretary, Frank Knox, whispered to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, 'I think the boss must have a great load off his mind. . . . At least we know what to do now.' The Second World War brought a truce in the American class war that had raged throughout the thirties, and it unified a bitterly divided country.

"This isn’t to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each created a common national narrative (which happened to be the victors’ narrative): both wars were about the country’s survival and the expansion of the freedoms on which it was founded. Nothing like this consensus has formed around September 11th.

"After the attacks, Americans asked, 'Why do they hate us?' This turned out to be the wrong line of inquiry. The most pressing questions were about us, not them: our leaders, our institutions, our ability to act as a cohesive nation and make rational decisions, our power to take action abroad in a way that would not be a self-defeating waste. Starting with the intelligence failures that did not foresee the attacks, every major American institution flunked the test of the September 11th decade. The media got the W.M.D.s wrong. The military failed to plan for chaos in postwar Iraq. Congress neglected its oversight duties. The political system produced no statesmen. C.E.O.s and financiers couldn’t see past short-term profits. The Bush Administration had one major success: it succeeded in staving off another terrorist attack in America. It botched almost everything else."



Note: This post should in no way be interpreted as a denouncement of our military troops fighting in the Middle East and elsewhere. I support the U.S. military and am thankful everyday for the soldiers who fight for our country. It is the decisions made at the top with which I do not always agree.


To read more about our fractured post-9/11 America, check out the entire article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/09/12/110912fa_fact_packer#ixzz1Xx68Rr6Y