I remember where I was on 9/11.
Everyone does.
I was driving to work, through a city rush hour, listening to the late PJ O'Rourke do an interview on a local rock station. They went to a break, so I flipped to the local NPR affiliate.
And I heard the most ominous sound in the world: NPR hosts trying to ad-lib.
To paraphrase Fred Thompson in Hunt for Red October, "NPR air talent doesn't take a dump without a script". When "Morning Edition" is trying to ad-lib, you know something has gone very wrong. In retrospect, I may have expected something even worse than a terrorist attack.
And I saw wonders that I may never see again. The nation came together. The West came together.
On 9/13, I took my kids to soccer practice — an inner-Saint Paul rec center league where I was the only parent who was in the same time zone as Republican. But as we waited for practice to begin, we heard a roar from the south. Two F16s from the Air National Guard in Duluth roared overhead, low and fast, headed back home after flying Combat Air Patrol over the Twin Cities. And every parent there — the soy-latte-drinkers, the non-profit execs, the grievance studies teachers, all of us — pumped our fists and cheered like a bunch of schoolkids; the US was going to take care of it.
And that was what I hoped at the time. While the war was new to American shores, it had been going on since I was a kid — Munich, the Iran Hostage Crisis, the Achille Lauro, all the bombings and kidnappings in Europe, the Beirut Barracks, the Khobar Towers, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the USS Cole — and now this.
And I thought of Winston Churchill's remarks after the Battle of El Alamein, the turning point of the war in North Africa, in 1942 - "this isn't the end. This isn't even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps the end of the beginning".
And I thought — hoped, really — that maybe that was where we were; at the end of the beginning of the conflict between Western Civilization and chaos. Had it been the end of the beginning of the clash of civilizations, it would have been...
...well, the ending we needed.
War, and history, are full of "Butterfly Effects" - disasters that led, however circuitously, to great, and good, changes. Washington getting ejected from New York and New Jersey in time for Christmas set the stage for the battles of Trenton and Princeton, which saved the American Revolution. The humiliation at Pearl Harbor set up the conditions that led to the crushing of Germany and Japan. The national agony of Vietnam laid the groundwork, in some key ways, for Reagan and the fall of the USSR.
So what did 9/11 lead to?
Charles C.W. Cooke says "anger" - and, at 25 years' remove, not much else. And I agree.
Nothing good came of September 11. Pearl Harbor, like Operation Barbarossa, brought about the conditions that guaranteed the Allies would win the war. Antietam led to the Emancipation Proclamation and, eventually, to the defeat of the Confederacy. September 11 had no salutary consequence. We would, without doubt, be better off if it had never happened. A quarter of a century later, I still find myself fantasizing idly about going back in time to stop it. When I visit New York, I look at the skyline and wonder if, somehow, the Twin Towers will magically be there. Even now, when I see the footage, I hope, impotently, that, perhaps this time, the planes will miss. They never do. They never will. Each time I watch it, three of the four will ineluctably hit their targets, and I will sit in stunned disbelief as if I were seeing it for the very first time. I cannot make it go away. It is indelible.
It could have been worse. We now know what we did not at the time. We know that such attacks did not become commonplace. We know that the day’s events did not represent the opening salvo in a world war. We know that they did not permanently scar America’s sense of self — and, indeed, that, far from dwelling on it, Americans now have to be urged to “never forget.” I am at no risk of that.
Indeed, there are some who want to sweep the whole thing into the memory hole:
The funny thing about this post is that they were taking so much heat for even asking the question that they’ve already deleted page their post links to. The not funny thing about it is that they posted it. https://t.co/ZdEunhEpVY pic.twitter.com/2dpneeK6eM
— Enguerrand VII de Coucy (@ingelramdecoucy) September 8, 2026
Not only did our riposte not push back the assault on Western Civilization, that attack is now fully established on our own shores.
There was, at best, no butterfly effect. At worst, things broke very much the wrong way.
