Chapter 34

9/11

At 8:45 A.M. on September 11, 2001, a com- mercial airliner hijacked by Islamic terrorists slammed into the north tower of the majestic World Trade Center in New York City. A second hijacked jumbo jet crashed into the south tower eighteen minutes later. The fuel- laden planes turned the majestic buildings into infernos, forcing desperate people who worked in the skyscrapers to jump to their deaths. The iconic twin towers, both 110 stories tall and occupied by thousands of employees, imploded from the intense heat. Surrounding buildings also collapsed. The southern end of Manhattan—ground zero—became a hellish scene of twisted steel, suffocating smoke, and wailing sirens. While the catastrophic drama in New York City was unfolding, a third hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. A fourth airliner, probably headed for the White House, missed its mark when passengers—who had heard reports of the earlier hijackings via cell phones—assaulted the hijackers to prevent the plane from being used as a weapon. During the struggle in the cockpit, the plane went out of control and plummeted into the Pennsylvania countryside, killing all aboard. The hijackings represented the worst terrorist assault in the nation's his- tory. There were 266 passengers and crewmembers aboard the crashed jets. More than 100 civilians and military personnel were killed at the Pentagon. The death toll at the World Trade Center was over 2,700, with many fire- fighters, police officers, and rescue workers among the dead. Hundreds of those killed were foreign nationals working in the financial district; some eighty nations lost citizens in the attacks. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 created shock and chaos, grief and anger. People rushed to donate blood, food, and money. Volunteers clogged mili- tary-recruiting centers. For the first time in its history, NATO invoked Article 5 of its charter, which states that an attack on any member will be considered an attack on all members. The stunning terrorist assaults led the editors of the New York Times to observe that 9/11 was "one of those moments in which history splits, and we define the world as before and after."

Contract With America

He was aided in his efforts by newly elected Repub- lican House members who promoted what Gingrich called with great fanfare the Contract with America. The ten-point contract outlined an anti-big-government program featuring less regulation of businesses, less environmental conservation, term limits for members of Congress, welfare reform, and a balanced-budget amendmen

No Child Left Behind

In addition to tax reduction, one of Presi- dent Bush's top priorities was to reform primary and secondary education. In late 2001, Congress passed a comprehensive education-improvement plan called No Child Left Behind that sought to improve educational qual- ity by requiring states to set new learning standards and to develop stan- dardized tests to ensure that all students were "proficient" at reading and math by 2014. It also mandated that all teachers be "highly qualified" in their subject area by 2005, allowed children in low-performing schools to transfer to other schools, and required states to submit annual standardized student test scores. A growing number of states criticized the program, claiming that it provided insufficient funds for remedial programs and that poor school districts, many of them in blighted inner cities or rural areas, would be especially hard-pressed to meet the new guidelines. The most common criticism, however, was that the federal program created a culture whereby teachers, feeling pressured to increase student performance, focused their classroom teaching on preparing students for the tests rather than fostering learning

Arab Awakening

The Arab Awakening began in mid-December 2010 in Tunisia, on the coast of North Africa. Like much of the Arab world, Tunisia was a chroni- cally poor nation suffering from high unemployment, runaway inflation, political corruption, and authoritarian rule. On December 17, Mohamed Bouazizi, a twenty-six-year-old street vendor distraught over rough police treatment, set himself on fire in a public square. His suicidal act was like a stone thrown into a pond whose ripples quickly spread outward. It sparked waves of pro-democracy demonstrations across Tunisia that forced the pres- ident, who had been in power for twenty-three years, to step down when his own security forces refused orders to shoot protesters. An interim government thereafter allowed democratic elections. Rippling waves of unrest sparked by the Tunisian "Burning Man" soon rolled across Algeria, Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, Oman, Yemen, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. The people's insistence on exercising their basic rights as citizens, the marches and rallies in the streets and parks, and the sudden coming to voice of the voiceless were tangible signs of an old order crumbling. In Egypt, the Arab world's most populous coun- try, several thousand protesters led by university students con- verged in the streets of teeming Cairo in late January, 2011. They demanded the end of the long rule of strongman Presi- dent Hosni Moubarak, a staunch American ally who had treated his own people with contempt. The boldness of the youthful rebels was contagious. Within a few days, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators representing all walks of life converged on Tahrir Square, where many of them en camped for eighteen days, singing songs, holding candlelight vigils, and waving flags in the face of a brutal crackdown by security forces. Violence erupted when Moubarak's supporters attacked the protesters. The government tried to cut off access to social communications—mobile telephones, text-messaging, and the Internet—but its success was limited. Desperate to stay in power, Moubarak replaced his entire cabinet, but it was not enough to quell the anti- government movement. On February 11, 2011, Moubarak resigned, ceding control to the military leadership. On March 4, a civilian was appointed prime minister, and elections were promised within a year. As the so-called Arab Awakening flared up in other parts of the region, some of the rebellions grew violent, some were brutally smashed (Syria), and some achieved substantial political changes. The remarkable uprisings heralded a new era in the history of the Middle East struggling to be born. Arabs had sud- denly lost their fear—not just their fear of violent rulers, but also their fear that they were not capable of democratic government. By the millions, they demon- strated with their actions that they would no longer passively accept the old way of being governed.

Albert Gore Jr.

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Barack Obama

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George W. Bush

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Hillary Rodham Clinton

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William Jefferson Clinton

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Ethnic Cleansing

Clinton's foreign policy also addressed the chaotic tran- sition in eastern Europe from Soviet domination to independence. When combustible Yugoslavia imploded in 1991, fanatics and tyrants triggered ethnic conflict as four of its six republics seceded. Serb minorities, backed by the new republic of Serbia, stirred up civil wars in Croatia and Bosnia. In Bosnia especially, the war involved "ethnic cleansing"—driving Muslims from their homes and towns.

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

In mid-February, after a prolonged and often strident debate, Congress passed, and Obama signed, a $787-billion economic stimulus bill called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It was the largest in history, but in the end not large enough to serve its purpose of restoring economic growth. The bill included cash distributions to the states, additional funds for food stamps, unemployment benefits, construction projects to renew the nation's infrastructure (roads, bridges, levees, government buildings, and the electricity grid), money for renewable-energy systems, and $212 billion in tax reductions for individuals and businesses. Yet the stimulus package was not robust enough to reverse the deepening recession. Moreover, con- gressional passage of the stimulus bill showed no evidence that Obama was successful in implementing a "bipartisan" presidency. Only three Senate Republicans voted for the bill. Not a single House Republican voted for it, and eleven House Democrats opposed it as well.

The Surge

Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan task force whose final report recom- mended that the United States withdraw its combat forces from a "grave and deteriorating Iraq" by the spring of 2008. President Bush disagreed with the findings of the Iraq Study Group and others, including key military leaders, who urged a phased withdrawal. On January 10, 2007, he announced that he was sending a "surge" of 20,000 (eventually 30,000) additional American troops to Iraq, bringing the total to almost 170,000. From a military perspective, the "surge" strategy suc- ceeded. By the fall of 2008, the convulsive violence in Iraq had declined dra- matically, and the U.S.-supported Iraqi government had grown in stature and confidence. But the financial expenses and human casualties of Ameri- can involvement in Iraq continued to generate widespread criticism, and the "surge" failed to attain its political objectives. Iraqi political leaders had yet to build a stable, self-sustaining democracy. The U.S. general who mas- terminded the increase in troops admitted that the gains remained "fragile and reversible

Tea Party

No sooner was Obama sworn in than limited-government con- servatives frustrated by his election began mobilizing to thwart any renewal of "tax-and-spend" liberalism. In January 2009, a New York stock trader named Graham Makohoniuk sent out an e-mail message urging people to send tea bags to the Senate and House of Representatives. He fastened on tea bags to symbolize the famous Boston Tea Party of 1773 during which out- raged American colonists protested against British tax policies. The e-mail message "went viral" among anti-tax libertarians and conservatives across the nation. Within days, thousands of tea bags poured into congressional offices. Within weeks, the efforts of angry activists coalesced into a decentralized nationwide protest movement soon labeled "the Tea Party." It had neither a national headquarters nor an official governing body; nor was there a formal process for joining the grassroots movement. Within a year or so, there were about a thousand Tea Party groups spread across the fifty states The Tea Party is at once a mood, an attitude, and an ideology, an eruption of libertarians, mostly white, male, middle-class Republicans over the age offorty- five, boiling mad at a political system that they believe has grown dependent on spending their taxes. The overarching aim of the Tea Party is to transform the Republican party into a vehicle of conservative ideology and eliminate all those who resist the true faith. More immediately, the "tea parties" rallied against President Obama's health-care initiative and economic stimulus package, argu- ing that they verged on socialism in their efforts to bail out corporate America and distressed homeowners. On April 15, 2009, the Internal Revenue tax-filing deadline, Tea Party demonstrations occurred in 750 cities What began as a scattering of anti-tax protests crystallized into a powerful anti-government movement promoting fiscal conservatism at the local, state, and national levels. Like Ronald Reagan, the Tea Party saw government as the problem, not the solution. As candidates began to campaign for the 2010 con- gressional elections, the Tea Party mobilized to influence the results, not by forming a third political party but by trying to take over the leadership of the Republican party. Members of the Tea Party were as frustrated by the old-line Republican establishment (RINOs—Republicans in Name Only) as they were disgusted by liberal Democrats The Tea Party members were not seeking simply to rebuild the Republican party; they wanted to take over a "decaying" Republican party and restore its anti-tax focus. Democrats, including President Obama, initially dismissed the Tea Party as a fringe group of extremists, but the 2010 election results proved them wrong.

Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)

On October 3, 2008, after two weeks of contentious and often emotional congressional debate, Presi- dent Bush signed into law a far-reaching historic bank bailout fund called the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The TARP called for the Trea- sury Department to spend $700 billion to keep banks and other financial institutions from collapsing. "By coming together on this legislation, we have acted boldly to prevent the crisis on Wall Street from becoming a crisis in communities across our country," Bush said after the House voted 263 to 171 to pass the TARP bill. Despite such unprecedented government invest- ment in the private financial sector, the economy still sputtered. In early October, stock markets around the world began to crash. Economists warned that the world was at risk of careening into a depression

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

The Bush administration had negotiated with Canada and Mexico. The debate revived old arguments on the tariff. Clinton stuck with his party's tradition of low tariffs and urged approval of NAFTA, which would make North America the largest free-trade area in the world, enabling the three nations to trade with each other on equal footing. Opponents of the bill, such as gadfly Ross Perot and organized labor, favored tariff barriers that would discourage the importation of cheaper foreign products. Perot pre- dicted that NAFTA would result in the "giant sucking sound" of American jobs being drawn to Mexico. Yet Clinton prevailed with solid Republican support while losing a sizable minority of Democrats, mostly from the South, where people feared that many textile mills would lose business to "cheap-labor" countries, as they did.

Occupy Wall Street

The emergence of the Tea Party illustrated the growing ideological extremism of twenty-first-century politics. On the left wing of the political spectrum, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, founded in the fall of 2011, represented the radical alternative to the Tea Party. In the spring of 2011 Kalle Lasn, the founding editor of Adbusters, an anti- consumerism magazine published in Vancouver, Canada, decided to pro- mote a grassroots uprising against a capitalist system that was promoting mindless materialism and growing economic and social inequality. What America most needed, Lasn believed, was a focused conversation about growing income inequality, diminishing opportunities for upward social mobility, runaway corporate greed as well as the distorting impact of corpo- rate donations to political campaigns, and economic fairness—all issues that had been exacerbated by the government "bailouts" of huge banks and cor- porations weakened by the Great Recession. As the Pew Research Center reported, the conflict between rich and poor had become "the greatest source of tension in American society." Lasn began circulating through his magazine and online networks a poster showing a ballerina perched atop the famous "Charging Bull" sculpture on Wall Street. The caption read: "What Is Our Demand? Occupy Wall Street. Bring tent." The call to arms quickly circulated over the Internet, and another decentralized grassroots movement was born. Within a few days OWS had launched an anarchical website, OccupyWallSt.org, and moved the headquar- ters for the anti-capitalist uprising from Vancouver to New York City. Dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of people, mostly young adults, many of them unemployed, converged on Zuccotti Park in southern Manhattan in a kind of spontaneous democracy. They formed tent villages and gathered in groups to "occupy" Wall Street to protest corrupt banks and brokerage houses whose "fraudsters," they claimed, had caused the 2008 economic crash and forced the severe government cutbacks in social welfare programs. OWS charged that most of the nation's financiers at the heart of the Great Reces- sion had not been prosecuted or even disciplined. The biggest banks were larger than ever, and huge bonuses were being paid to staff members. The protesting "occupiers" drafted a "Declaration of the Occupation" that served as the manifesto of a decentralized movement dedicated to under- mining the disproportionate political and economic power exercised by the Wall Street power brokers. OWS demanded that corporate donations to political candidates cease and that elected officials focus on helping people rather than bailing out big business. Economic data showed that for decades the super-rich had been garnering a growing percentage of national wealth at the expense of the working and middle classes. In 1980, the richest one percent of Americans controlled ten percent of all personal income; by 2012, the top one percent amassed twenty-five percent of total income. And the people hurt most by the Great Recession were those at the bottom of the income scale. By 2010, there were 46.2 million Americans living below the U.S. poverty line, an all-time record. The OWS protesters were deter- mined to reverse such economic and social trends. They described them- selves as the voice of the 99 percent of Americans who were being victimized by the 1 percent of the wealthiest and most politically connected Americans. As one of the protesters proclaimed, "everyone can see that the [capitalist] system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well." The OWS protesters excelled at creative disruption. They tried to shut down the New York Stock Exchange, held a sit-in at the nearby Brooklyn Bridge, and grappled with police. The vagueness ("We are our demands!") of a spontaneous grassroots "movement without demands" was initially a virtue, as the demonstrations attracted national media coverage. "We can't hold on to any authority," one organizer explained. "We don't want to." But soon thousands more alienated people showed up, many of whom brought their own agendas to the effort. A "horizontal" movement with organizers and facilitators but no leaders at times morphed into a chaotic mob punctu- ated by antic good cheer and zaniness (organizers dressed up as Wall Street executives, stuffed Monopoly "play" money in their mouths, etc.). At the same time, however, the anarchic energies of OWS began to spread like a virus across the nation. Similar efforts calling for a "government accountable to the people, freed up from corporate influence" emerged in cities around the globe; encampments of alienated activists sprang up in over a thousand towns and cities. On December 6, 2011, President Obama echoed the OWS movement when he deplored in a speech "the breathtaking greed of a few" and said that the effort to restore economic "fairness" was the "defining issue of our time." Although the OWS demonstrations receded after many cities ordered police to arrest the protesters and dismantle the ramshackle encampments, by the end of 2011 the OWS effort to spark a national conver- sation about growing income inequality had succeeded. As the New York Times announced, "The new progressive age has begun."

Osama Bin Laden

al Qaeda (the Base), a well-financed worldwide net- work of Islamic extremists led by a wealthy Saudi renegade, Osama bin Laden. Years before, bin Laden had declared jihad (holy war) on the United States, Israel, and the Saudi monarchy. He believed that the United States, like the Soviet Union, was on the verge of collapse; all it needed was a spark to ignite its self-destruction. To that end, for several years he had been using remote bases in war-torn Afghanistan as terrorist training centers. Collabo- rating with bin Laden's terrorist network was Afghanistan's ruling Taliban, a coalition of ultraconservative Islamists that had emerged in the mid-nineties following the forced withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. Taliban leaders provided bin Laden with a safe haven, enabling him to recruit Mus- lim militants and mobilize them into a global strike force. As many as twenty thousand recruits from twenty different countries circulated through Afghan training camps before joining secret jihadist cells around the world. Their goal was to engage in urban warfare, assassination, demolition, and sabotage, with the United States and Europe as the primary targets.