Jordan Michael Smith writes:

On a warm June evening in downtown Manhattan, tourists hoping to visit the National September 11 Memorial & Museum are disappointed. The spot is closed after 5 p.m., a security guard repeats patiently to visitors. From behind a rope, the tourists look at the spaces where the Twin Towers used to be. The names of the 2,977 people killed by Al Qaeda in September 2001 are etched into bronze parapets surrounding two pools. Water flows down 30 feet in clear streams over the walls into the pools. During the day, if you are close enough to the water, the endless noise of the city is drowned out. But on nights like this one, New York’s cacophony makes itself heard here. If you close your eyes, it doesn’t sound very different than it did before the terrorists devastated the buildings.

This September marks the twentieth anniversary of the attacks. “Everybody was traumatized,” remembered Richard Clarke, the chief counterterrorism adviser at the time. In the immediate aftermath, Clarke said, the Bush administration was mainly concerned with reacting swiftly to prevent another attack. “[We were trying] to put ourselves in the heads of Al Qaeda, imagine what they might do next, and that was difficult because there were so many vulnerabilities, particularly back then, and a very long list of things they could do.”

Perhaps inevitably, fear and anger influenced U.S. policymaking in the weeks and months after the attacks. But so did other tendencies with deeper sources in Washington foreign policy establishment circles: delusions of grandeur, threat inflation, faith in the ability of armed force to solve political problems, and a refusal to accept limits and trade-offs. As President George W. Bush’s fatefully termed “Global War on Terror” enters its third decade, its enormous costs proliferate.

The price tag is staggering. More than 7,000 American military personnel have died in the U.S.-led wars worldwide since 9/11, and as of 2015, another 50,000-plus had been wounded. An additional 30,000 active-duty personnel and veterans of these wars have died by suicide. More than 7,402 U.S. contractors were also killed, in Afghanistan and Iraq alone. The direct deaths in the wars were upward of 800,000, but Brown University’s Costs of War project, which supplied the data in this paragraph, found that several times that were killed indirectly through such causes as war-related disease and water shortages. As of last year, the wars have cost about $6.4 trillion, and there will be the future costs of service members’ long-lasting benefits. And finally, the wars have created at least 37 million refugees. [Continue reading…]