The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were successful.
The intent of the terrorists who attacked those buildings was, by definition, to terrorize. In that they succeeded, probably beyond Osama bin Laden's wildest dreams. The United States government has, over time, created a $44B agency devoted to saving the population from a recurrence of what has been, so far, a one-off tragedy. Despite numerous claims of successes against what's been billed as an existential threat to the country, the most obvious effect of those successes has been to desensitize Americans to intrusions on their privacy via warrantless wiretapping, shoe and liquid removal at airport security checkpoints, an ineffective war against the terrorists in Afghanistan and a completely unnecessary and tragic one in Iraq, and a colossal loss of goodwill toward America in the world as a whole.
The terrorists succeeded in panicking governments in this country; they also succeeded in panicking the media. They did not entirely succeed in panicking the population; most of us have gone on living our lives without much conscious change in our habits or lifestyles. The biggest effect of those attacks was that they allowed cynical politicians to use them to aggregate more and more authority in the name of "protection." It's not that different from racketeering, when you think about it. "Give up some of these civil liberties so we can protect you better," they say, and too many of us have said, "Oh, sure, I'm not using them anyway." It reminds me of the old joke about the guy selling elephant fences in Omaha. "They protect your yard from rampaging elephants," he says. "But there are no elephants here," you say. "See," he says, "they work!"
Paul Campos has written a very good essay about this as well.
Posted by Linkmeister at September 11, 2008 10:38 AM | TrackBack