Eight Years Later

It is that moment that my generation will always remember.

On September 11, 2001, I was just entering my first full week of high school. I was in second period World History class with Ms. Croley when the announcement was made. I was sitting in the third seat of the second row on the left-hand side of classroom #100 at St. Pius X. She turned off the projector and told us to say a prayer. It was a few hours later (in Ms. Cebula's fifth period Physical Science class) that I saw the video for the first time. I'm not sure how much later it was before I believed it was real.

Eight years later, we still haven't caught Osama. We still haven't rebuilt much of anything on that block in lower Manhattan. But, we also haven't been attacked again. I don't know if that's a victory or not, but at least its not a loss. The important thing is to remember those who died, thank those who have kept us safe since then, and (most importantly) to resist the temptation to trade our rights in name of security, despite the fear that might encourage us to do so.

Andrew Sullivan offers four things we have learned from the war that began on 9/11:

"The first is that total security is impossible in a free society.

I understand deeply the hankering for it in the ashes of the World Trade Center. But we should all acknowledge that a free society will never be able to have 100 percent level of success against those who are prepared to kill themselves in acts of terror. The Cheney promise is a mirage - and getting there could mean losing far more than we gain.

The second is that defeating this menace is not amenable to conventional military power; and that intervention in Muslim countries needs to be calibrated very, very carefully to avoid generating more terror than we manage to suppress.

The third is that nation-building and counter-insurgency in countries which are barely nations and failed states is a century-long enterprise. Occupations that long are imperial ventures. Imperial ventures can become self-sustaining. They are harder to end than government programs, because they are, in part, a government program. Unless they can be shown to drastically reduce the terror threat to the West, they can be ghastly errors. The war in Iraq remains such a ghastly error. The war in Afghanistan, alas, now another. A great power with the debt levels of the US right now is not Britain in the early 19th century; it's Britain in the early 20th century. Empire has to be paid for. And we have long since run out of money.

Fourth. We should not grant the enemy more allure than he deserves. Al Qaeda is now weaker than it once was - rejected by the people in Iraq and Jordan, decimated by the military and CIA under Bush and Obama. They did not have access to weapons of mass destruction, or they would have used them a long time ago. Smarter, more targeted detection, surveillance, skilled interrogation (not sadistic brutality), more skilled and culturally-attuned human intelligence: these are the skills we need."