Many years from now, when historians look back on this decade, which day will they say “changed the world” more: 9/11/01, or 9/15/08?
Perhaps the answer is 9/11 simply because it was more of a self-contained event, which, all by itself, set enormous changes into motion — whereas the collapse of Lehman Brothers was merely one catastrophic event among many in the financial and economic crisis of 2007-2009. On the other hand, Lehman’s collapse was the specific event that had the near-term effect of virtually shutting down the world financial system, which in turn led quite directly to a variety of medium-term and long-term consequences, notably the passage of TARP, a variety of changes in the way Wall Street does business, and, quite possibly, the election of Barack Obama. (Though, of course, no one will ever be able to definitively prove that last one.)
A broader — though to me, slightly less interesting — version of my question would be: which series of events changed the world more, 9/11 and the foreign policy events it helped trigger, or the global financial crisis of 2007-2009 as a whole and the changes it caused (and will yet cause)?
I don’t know the answer to these questions, but they’re the sort of thing I’d love to hear a bunch of smart people argue about.
I make no claim on the “smart people” part of your wish, but I have to go with 9/11 – I doubt Bush would have been reelected otherwise. After 9/11, this country collectively lost its sh**, paving the way to everything from Iraq to torture to the rise of The Daily Show as a news outlet.
And I think we know which one of those consequences is the most historically significant. Heh.
9/11.
We’ve had financial meltdowns before, and while this wasn’t an entirely similar event (and the prescriptions written for it certainly are new), I don’t think anyone who lived through the 1929 crash would be left stupefied by what happened. They might be mystified by the alphabet-soup of CDOs and MBSs, but so is just about everyone today; they’d understand investments based on the gamble that real estate would continue to rise failed, and spectacularly so. On a certain level, everything else is just CNBC/Wall Street gobbledygook.
9/11, on the other hand, was a paradigm shift in terms of how terrorism works
(it had always been small-scale) and how America’s military forces should best align to defend us. Asymmetrical warfare was virtually an unknown concept in a world still coming to grips with the end of the bipolar Cold War era. There’s simply no event in the history of the world that one can point to and say “Well, 9/11 was just like that.”
It’s likely that for the foreseeable future, every major armed conflict will revolve around political/religious ideology, rather than around land or resources or money as most wars throughout history have been.
Well, the smart money is on the “we just don’t know” response. It is, in fact, entirely possible that the seminal date of this decade is neither of those. That seems doubtful but possible. The gut reaction would have to be 9/11 that date is seared into the public conciseness. On the other hand it’s had about 8 years to sink in, the Lehman collapse has had less than a year. And, more importantly, we don’t have any idea how those events are going to play out. We are far too close to right the history and close the chapter on this one. Ask again in 60 years and I’ll let you know. And I’ll probably be kind of grumpy about it too.
Terrorism had always been small scale? Right… I’m afraid you are going to need to back that up and define your terms more clearly before I’ll be letting that one go.
And Asymmetrical warfare was a very known known. WWI, WWII, and the Cold War are, in my opinion, are more outliers from general trend of asymmetrical conflicts around the world and through history. What makes the conflict with Al Queda interesting is that it is a modern military conflict with a non state power. But that goes more to a failing in how we are attempting to deal with the conflict than it does a paradigm shift. Misunderstanding the conflict also lead to the irrational invasion of Iraq and an almost negligent approach to Iran and Pakistan. But failure to comprehend does not, on it’s own, make paradigm shift . By it’s nature a paradigm shift would require us to actually understand what is going on and shift our policy and approach to meet our new understanding. That is simply not the case, at least up to this point.
Over on Facebook, Russ writes:
Pre-9/11, the worst year for international terrorism (as defined by total lives taken according to the U.S. State Department) was 1998, when 741 people were killed by terrorist attacks. Four times that many people were killed on 9/11, and absent the heroic efforts of the FDNY et al. it could have been much more. We can comprehend now how terrorism can involve large-scale attacks, but at the time “terrorism” evoked ideas of car bombs at cafés or individually targeted assassinations.
Obviously “asymmetrical warfare” was not a completely foreign concept — the Vietnam War is an easy example — but everyone had assumed that any significant foreign threat to Americans on American soil would involve nations with weapons stockpiles, not individuals who hijacked tools of civilian life.
So I am imagining Pan Am 103? Granted that was *only* 270 killed. But it was also a fairly aggressive gesture. So was the Munich Massacre during the 1972 olympics. So was the Oklahoma city bombing. Or for that matter the failed attack on the World Trade Center. The Clinton, and Bush The Elder administrations both thwarted large scale terrorist actions on US soil. So the idea that terrorists might go big was certainly there. Now perhaps there was a sense that terrorists couldn’t go big on US soil, but that shows more of a lack in imagination and hubris than it does a lack in the possibility of it happening. Actually, if I recall the 1996 movie Executive Decision conceptualized a terrorist plot more dastardly than 9/11. Complete with hijacked aircraft. Also in the post Cold War era most intelligence operations and threat assessments were based on and focused on the possibility of attacks from small insular terrorist organizations. That the Bush The Younger administration chose to ignore this information and instead focus on Iraq again, does not actually prove your point.
None of this is to minimize what happened on 9/11. It was certainly a massive attack on US soil by a non state actor. An attack of the same order of magnitude as Perl Harbor. And I’m fairly certain it will be just as remembered and just as much a day of infamy as that was. But new? Paradigm shift? Certainly not new (Rome was overthrown by what we would more or less call a terrorist attack today and in a massively asymmetrical conflict.) As for a paradigm shift? No, mostly because we don’t seem to have really learned a damn thing from it. Which is an unfortunate and serious problem.
To say if the current financial crisis will have the same “legs” as the great depression? Well it is far too soon to say. This history on that is wide open. Hence there being no real answer to Brendan’s question as yet.
Of course, you’re not imagining Pan Am 103. But, tragic as that was to all souls aboard and the unfortunate people in Lockerbie where it crashed, it was just a plane. 9/11 set out to destroy the symbolic centers of the financial, military and political might of this nation. It succeeded in the first, wounded the second, and thanks to another heroic effort by the citizen-heroes of Flight 93, we don’t really know what could have happened to the third.
Can you agree that had the hijackers of United 93 succeeded in their plans to crash the plane in the Capitol, that this wouldn’t even be an argument, because pictures, videos and memories of the building in flames would be so searing that the comparison would feel silly? Well, the fact that they didn’t make it doesn’t really change things.
Bush’s “failures” (whatever they may be) don’t “actually prove my point” because they were independent actions. They may have been based on a response to 9/11, but they are a separate argument. However, you’ve quite nicely proven my point by the Pearl Harbor comparison: an overt act of war by a nation-state with its own military forces, directed at a purely military target — and it’s the closest analogue we have to September 11: a similar act of war with similar casualty rates, but everything else was completely new, different, and terrifying.
9/11 will be remembered as the more influential event under the current circumstances. I don’t think I agree that it IS, but hey, historians have been playing this game forever, and will continue to do so with these events. 😉
I do think that if the financial events get worse and worse, so that everyone agrees that we are in a Second Great Depression, 9/11 isn’t going to be seen as influential.
Also, I have a feeling that we will always keep track of the current Financial Crisis by that 9/15/08 date, even though that’s not accurately the start of this mess. It IS a convenient date to point to, and I think we will stick to that – just like Black Friday isn’t the start of the Great Depression either, but we use that date because it holds an event that everyone at the time stopped and said “what the HECK just happened?!?!?”
My point isn’t in picking one event or the other. I don’t think we are far enough away from either of the events to really say which is the defining moment of the early 21st century. Historians might well argue in future generations that the 20th century ended with 9/11 and that the 21st began with 9/15/08. Who knows. I could certainly see the argument there. It’s one of those things historians like to do and the financial situation still hasn’t played itself out yet. It is possible that the present situation could make 9/11 look like a minor event. We simply don’t know.
My point remains with 9/11 that there was nothing new and unprecedented about the attack beyond a modern large scale successful attack by a non state actor. There was nothing new about terrorists trying such things. Nor is there anything new about surprise attacks. Or attacks that cause large scale military and civilian casualties. Or attacks designed to terrorize the population. Or symbolic attacks. I can post some pictures of DC burning during the war of 1812. At the time of that attack the British were looking for a symbolic victory that would break the will of the American people to continue to fight the war. They didn’t succeed. The US use of the atom bomb in WWII was as much symbolic as it was tactical.