Bin Laden is Gone But Did He Win? Did He Turn Us into a Nation of Scaredy-Cats?
ShareThe roar of the F-16s disturbed the calm on that sunny day in May 2005, but it was the sudden whoosh of helicopters shooting low overhead that brought people out onto the streets of the leafy neighborhood near the National Cathedral just three miles from the White House.
Soon the reason became clear: the almost comical put-putting of a Cessna 150 as it meandered over the quiet residences.
The aging single-engine plane, and its aging and befuddled pilot had managed to shut down all three branches of government and sent Vice President Dick Cheney fleeing from his office.
Four years after Sept. 11, an aircraft no bigger than a car and traveling not much faster sent Washington's top leadership into a panic. Osama bin Laden had done it again.
Locked away in a hidey-hole in Afghanistan or Pakistan, bin Laden didn't have to lift a finger to scare the pants off us. With a single spectacular attack, he achieved the ultimate goal of a terrorist: frightening an entire nation and forcing us to squander a budget surplus on two unwinnable wars.
Now he is dead, but has bin Laden won the bigger fight? Has he turned us into a nation of scaredy-cats?
For weeks after Sept. 11 New Yorkers vied with Washington area residents to claim they had been the most damaged and traumatized by the attacks.
After the attacks induced national hysteria, anyone even trying to say "grow up" was shouted down and even accused of a lack of patriotism. No one repeated Franklin D. Roosevelt's inaugural cautionary words: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
Instead, we knocked one another over in our rush to embrace ever-longer security lines at airports, rent-a-cops demanding to see driver's licenses on the ground floors of medical office buildings and the demolition of parking lots around national monuments, all in the name of security.
"I have always been surprised by the level of fear that I have seen in everyday life," said Gilles Dorronsoro, a French expert on Afghanistan, Turkey, and South Asia at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"It is more in the United States than any other country I have ever seen," Dorronsoro said in an interview.
That's right - a Frenchman calling Americans cowards.
Dorronsoro rightly points out that an American's risk of dying in a terrorist attack is infinitesimal. Americans are far more likely to die in car crashes, or even to fall off ladders. "But it is impossible to go on TV in the United States and say bin Laden and al-Qaida are not such a big deal," he said.
Politicians and media helped drive the fear. Check out our feature on how politicians from Saxby Chambliss to Hillary Rodham Clinton exploited the anxiety in their campaigns. http://www.nationaljournal.com/video-the-five-most-aggressive-political-ads-featuring-bin-laden-20110502?page=1
"He understood the way to get people to fear you," says Dr. Marc Siegel, an internist at NYU Langone Medical Center who wrote False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear.
"He understood that if you strategically kill some people, it causes a great psychic harm. He has risen into the mythos category."
No one else has scared Americans like this - not Hitler, certainly not the old Soviet Union. While the specter of a nuclear attack encouraged a few folks to build bomb shelters and had a generation learning to duck under desks, it never caused Americans to surrender as much freedom as they have in the past decade, and certainly not to wallow in their worry.
"He is a great evil. But the extent to which we are afraid of him has to do with voyeurism and maybe a soft underbelly," Siegel said.
So now he is gone. The team of Navy SEALS crawled under our beds, dragged out the monster and killed it.
So now can we finally get some sleep?
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