Long Before Towers Fell

“If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.” — Thomas Edison

Before 9/11, I knew almost nothing about the Middle East.

I had lived through Desert Storm. I had watched maps glow on television and heard the music of patriotic certainty hummed under every broadcast. But I did not understand the region, and more importantly, I did not think I needed to. I was American. Ignorance was part of the package. Our mythology has always included the luxury of not learning the names of the places our power rearranges.

That changed after September 11.

What I began to see, slowly and then all at once, was not just terrorism, but the architecture around it: the geopolitical bargains, the hypocrisies, the old manipulations, the strategic vanity, the religious volatility, and the long habit of treating entire regions like chessboards for men who would never have to live in the rubble. The attacks were horrifying. That part is simple. What stayed with me was not only the violence itself, but the scale and stupidity of the response.

A group of jihadists hijacked commercial jets, trained in part on our own soil, learned to operate in our suburbs, passed through our systems, and turned civilian airliners into weapons. And our answer was not first to harden the perimeter, secure the infrastructure, rethink ports, supply chains, intelligence failures, or domestic vulnerabilities. No, our answer was to unleash the full American war machine abroad.

Afghanistan first. Then Iraq. Then the whole post-9/11 era metastasized into a doctrine: when struck, do not merely respond—expand. Search and destroy. Invade, occupy, contract, rebuild, destabilize, repeat.

It always struck me as the logic of a man who comes home to find his house burglarized and decides the correct response is not to change the locks, install cameras, and organize the block—but to assemble the HOA into a death squad and raid the other side of town. That was our posture. Not reflection. Not redesign. Retaliatory sprawl.

And what a bill we ran up.

Not just in dollars, though those numbers are obscene. Not just in lives, though those numbers are worse. We spent national treasure like drunk emperors and called it strategy. We fed defense contractors, private security firms, consultants, lobbyists, lawyers, and every other species of parasite that breeds in the warm dark underbelly of permanent war. We converted fear into an industry.

And while all of that was happening, we turned panic into civic ritual.

The post-9/11 years were an education in absurdity. We were given color-coded terror alerts as if national security were a mood ring. We were told to fear anthrax with the grave seriousness of a civilization under siege, and somewhere in the national imagination trash bags and duct tape became magical instruments of survival. The whole thing felt half war briefing, half infomercial, as though the republic had been placed in the hands of men who believed preparedness was mostly a branding problem.

That was one of the great lessons of the era: fear sells faster than understanding.

It still does.

Twice in a generation, and then some, the public has learned to panic on cue. We are conditioned by flashes, banners, chyrons, alerts, and the managerial language of emergency. We do not study events; we consume them. We do not metabolize reality; we binge it. And once a population becomes fluent in panic, it becomes much easier to govern through emotional reflex than public intelligence.

You can see the same broken circuitry in our response to school shootings.

There is the liberal fantasy that we can slogan our way into disarmament in a country already soaked through with guns. Then there is the conservative fetish, the theological romance of the weapon itself, as though the Second Amendment were not a political principle but a personality type. Both are evasions.

Children are dying in schools. That should be the fixed point. Everything else is noise.

The problem is not reducible to hardware, but neither is it solved by worshipping hardware. It is a systems problem: access, timing, grievance, alienation, spectacle, pharmaceuticals, status panic, algorithmic radicalization, and a culture that keeps selling violence as a shortcut to significance. We have built a society that produces social isolation, mass resentment, and fame hunger, then act shocked when some broken young man decides to force himself into history with a weapon and a livestream.

The answer is not fantasy confiscation. It is not macho idolatry either. It is the boring mechanical work of reducing risk: slowing access, identifying crisis, separating volatile people from lethal means, and refusing to turn every new massacre into a cultural merchandising opportunity.

Because that is what we do. We merchandise everything. Even grief.

I know something about that instinct because I once fed it myself.

There was a time when I was a committed social-media junkie, not because I wanted attention so much as because I wanted to correct stupidity. That was my delusion: that information, delivered sharply enough, might beat ignorance in open combat.

So I followed the local county page for the usual practical reasons—burn bans, election chatter, public notices—and discovered instead an endless swamp of conspiracy, gossip, prayer requests, slander, and seasonal snake executions. Every spring, as predictable as pollen, people would start posting photos of dead snakes with the caption: What kind of snake is this?

Most of them were harmless. Some were even beneficial. But small-town panic, especially when lacquered with bad theology and Facebook confidence, has a body count. So one day, exhausted by the stupidity of it, I decided to test the system with satire.

I posted a photo of a dead bald eagle, stolen from a university website, and wrote: Can anyone tell me what kind of bird this is? It was eyeing my Boston Terrier, so I took its life.

Chaos.

Death threats. Moral outrage. Patriotism lectures. People calling me every kind of bastard they could think of. Then my wife called me at work to tell me a federal game warden was at our house. More than a hundred people had reported it. They traced the image, confirmed it was fake, and closed the case.

And all I could think was this: after nearly every mass shooting, the same refrain appears. There were warning signs. There were disturbing posts. There were threats. There were clues. Yet somehow the system manages to treat obvious danger as background noise while mobilizing state attention over an intentionally absurd joke about a bird.

That mismatch tells you something.

Not just about law enforcement, but about symbolic order. What a society chooses to notice reveals what it truly values. We are often quicker to defend icons than human beings.

To understand why the response to 9/11 became so large, so theatrical, and so catastrophically misdirected, you have to step backward. September 11 was not a bolt from a clear sky. It was an eruption from a landscape that had been shaped for decades.

This is where the names start to matter—Kissinger, Rumsfeld, Bush—but not because history is reducible to great men. Quite the opposite. What matters is the machinery they served and refined.

Kissinger, in my mind, remains a deeply complicated figure: brilliant, strategic, disciplined, often dazzling in the narrow technical sense, and morally corrosive in the broader human one. He understood timing, leverage, ambiguity, and the uses of delay. He also helped normalize a mode of statecraft in which bodies become abstractions and intervals become acceptable places to bury the dead. Vietnam did not simply continue; it was managed, paced, repositioned, widened. Time itself became a weapon.

Rumsfeld represented a different instrument—less diplomacy than hardware, posture, and force architecture. Bush, especially in the first Gulf War and its aftermath, embodied coalition management and the careful packaging of American power as reluctant necessity. Put them together and you get a template: perception, force, coalition, repeat.

Kissinger moved the pieces. Rumsfeld stocked the board. Bush played the table.

Meanwhile, the United States was making deals elsewhere that would harden into future constraints. The security bargain with Saudi Arabia tied American power to oil and monarchy in ways that would outlive the men who made it. Covert operations in Latin America taught us to denounce instability in public while manufacturing it in private. The drug war at home coexisted with cold-eyed tolerance for narcotics traffic when it suited proxy conflicts abroad. Libya was turned into a durable villain, then later broken under the moral language of intervention. Afghanistan itself became a laboratory for the unintended consequences of development, covert war, and strategic impatience.

This is the real story of American power in the late twentieth century: not isolated mistakes, but layered contradictions. We preached liberty while empowering tyrants. We condemned terror while practicing forms of organized violence too respectable to call by the same name. We claimed realism while repeatedly proving incapable of understanding the downstream effects of our own actions.

And then we sprinkled religion into the whole damned apparatus.

Once faith enters a geopolitical grievance structure, the voltage changes. Land, oil, security, humiliation, alliance, occupation—these are already combustible. Wrap them in sacred language and compromise starts to look like apostasy. A drone strike becomes more than a strike. A troop deployment becomes more than a deployment. A policy becomes a civilizational insult. Every action acquires metaphysical overtones, and every counteraction becomes easier to justify.

That does not excuse terrorism. It explains how the atmosphere becomes breathable for it.

Which is why I have never been especially interested in reducing 9/11 to Osama bin Laden as singular monster. He mattered, obviously. But focusing too tightly on the villain can become a way of protecting the system that produced the conditions of his rise. Personal evil is real. Structural enablement is real too. One man can order an atrocity. A civilization can spend decades building the runway.

That, to me, is the larger point.

History is full of people with extraordinary force of will, extraordinary charisma, extraordinary power to mobilize others. Those capacities are morally neutral until directed. That is why the final thought experiment matters, uncomfortable as it is.

What if someone with catastrophic influence had chosen differently?

What if the same obsessive drive that can organize destruction had been bent toward construction? What if mass persuasion, theatrical instinct, and political energy had been routed toward repair rather than annihilation? The question is not meant to redeem monsters. It is meant to remind us that influence alone has no conscience. Human choice supplies the conscience, or withholds it.

That is true of dictators. It is true of presidents. It is true of diplomats, generals, ideologues, propagandists, and pundits. It is true of nations too.

The twentieth century did not simply produce villains. It produced systems that rewarded certain kinds of villainy while disguising others in the language of order, stability, freedom, and necessity. By the time the towers fell, the board had been set for a long time. The attack was shocking. The conditions were not.

That is what I had to learn after 9/11.

Not just that America could be struck, but that America had spent decades helping to shape the world in which such a strike became imaginable. Not just that fear could be weaponized, but that it could be monetized, ritualized, and converted into policy. Not just that institutions lie, but that they often lie most convincingly when they are still half-telling the truth.

And not just that power corrupts.

Power arranges the future.