A year into the American fiasco in Iraq, the legal scholar Kim Lane Scheppele argued that the idea of the state of exception illuminates the connection between the Cold War national security apparatus and its expansion after September 11, 2001. “Confronted with a new enemy after 9/11,” Scheppele wrote, “the Bush administration fell back into Cold War habits.” Vice President Dick Cheney first articulated his “one percent doctrine,” which asserted the need to treat the lowest probability threats as though they were certain to occur, in November 2001, and it guided the administration’s response. After seeing America humiliated by Al Qaeda on their watch, Bush and Cheney panicked, wildly overreacted, and committed themselves to acting recklessly in the name of preventing future attacks.
The most reckless thing they did, of course, was topple Saddam Hussein’s regime by launching the largest U.S. invasion and occupation of another country in the past half-century. While Bush is ultimately responsible for the Iraq War and for the dishonest way it was marketed to the public, it’s important to note how much support he had for this decision: at the time of the invasion in March 2003, more than 70 percent of Americans backed it. Around 40 percent of House Democrats and 29 out of 50 Senate Democrats — including Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, and Chuck Schumer — voted to authorize the invasion, alongside most Republicans. Many prominent liberal commentators, including current Atlantic editor-in-chief and inadvertent group chat participant Jeffrey Goldberg, endorsed it. There was a widespread desire in the aftermath of 9/11, articulated eloquently by Thomas Friedman two months into the war, to tell the Arab world to “suck on this!”
This posture defined the Bush presidency from September 2001 until about November 2006, when midterm defeats compelled Bush to sideline Cheney and force Donald Rumsfeld to resign. This marked the end of a roughly five-year-long state of exception with extremely wide buy-in. In the immediate wake of the attacks, a terrified public and its particularly terrified New York- and Washington-based elites handed over unprecedented power to a sovereign, Bush, who had run for president less than one year prior promising a “humble” foreign policy and criticizing nation-building and military overextension. Although the acute panic after the attacks gradually wound down, many aspects of the state of exception were long-lasting. While Bush spent his final years in office as a weak president cleaning up after his costly disasters, much of the legal and infrastructural legacy of the post-9/11 moment became so entrenched that it could continue its operations seamlessly under Barack Obama, and it remains intact more than two decades after the attacks.