Meeting the Enemy
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The repercussions of 9/11 continue to ripple through the historiography of the United States. The terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington D. C. and the subsequent war on terror have revealed, in high relief, threads in American history that had hitherto been overlooked, ignored, or dismissed. So too, they have eroded many inherited verities.
The United States adopted methods to wage its war on terror that seemingly would have been inconceivable a decade or two prior. The use of torture by the United States is a case in point. During the early days of the war on terror, critics attacked the Bush administration's use of "enhanced interrogation" as an unprecedented deviation from the established course of American history. Before 9/11, torture was a practice popularly associated with premodern societies and modern totalitarian regimes. Previously historians had acknowledged that Americans committed torture, but the practice here was dismissed as extra-legal, exceptional, and peripheral to the nation's history. In keeping with the idea that torture was committed by other people elsewhere, the New York Times dogmatically embraced the Bush administration's neologism "enhanced interrogation" to describe violence that the newspaper otherwise labelled torture when perpetrated by other nations.
Since 9/11, we also have witnessed the widespread and seemingly unchecked adoption of "targeted killings" in the war on terror. High-technology American drones have carried out thousands of attacks on individuals and small groups of purported terrorists. Hitherto, such killings would have sparked intense debate over their legitimacy; they likely would have been denounced as assassinations if they had been conducted by our enemies. But the thousands of "targeted killings" have failed to prompt national outrage, even when, for example, the killing of Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020 was deemed unlawful by the United Nations.1 [End Page 198]
As the war on terror and the debate over the nation's embrace of torture continued, activists, legal scholars, and historians revealed the long backstory of the use of torture by American state agents (and their predecessors) that extended from the age of conquest to the Central American civil wars of the 1980s. This tradition, we learned, informed and emboldened the Bush administration at the dawn of the twenty-first century.2
Broadly speaking, 9/11 and the nation's response to those events appears to have delivered the coup de grace to "American exceptionalism" as it was understood by previous generations of Americans. With origins in Reformation Europe, the idea matured during the Enlightenment and was burnished further by the Founders. Abraham Lincoln embraced it, while Woodrow Wilson and his ilk used it to justify the nation's global ambitions. Later yet, during the Cold War, historians and social scientists embedded the notion in the foundations of the nation's intellectual life.
From our vantage point on the other side of 9/11, it is clear that the idea of American exceptionalism rested on selective definitions that flattered Americans. The manner in which the United States has conducted itself has been less exceptional than the ways in which the nation has justified itself. For instance, from the nation's founding until World War Two, the United States boasted that it was one of the least militarized societies in the advanced world. Similarly, much was made of the American contribution to the laws of war and of nations. The so-called Lieber Code, issued during the Civil War by the Lincoln administration, became a cornerstone of modern efforts to curtail the carnage of war. Yet even while Americans recoiled at European militarism, they conquered a continent, displacing or subsuming millions who never sought to become members of the "Novus ordo seclorum." So too Americans waged a vicious civil war that mobilized both warring sides to an unprecedented degree and in exceptional ways. The acclaimed Lieber Code codified the primacy of "military necessity" as the ultimate loophole for the...
