On the Twenty-Fifth 9/11 Anniversary, the State Rehearses Its Own Survival

A quarter century after the attacks, your rulers are still moving pieces on that same board. The Pentagon memorial is now declared an “Affiliated Area of the National Park System,” with every stainless steel bench and shallow pool suddenly raised into the firmament of national symbols. A president speaks at the Pentagon but not at New York’s memorial, where organizers bar speeches to keep the rite nonpartisan. Meanwhile, another ceremony rises in Pennsylvania for Flight 93, and beams of light pierce the sky from a distant mountain. Do not be distracted by incense. This is the state, in many hands and on many stages, rehearsing the story by which it intends to live.

When I wrote *The Prince*, I said that men judge more by the eyes than the hands, and that a ruler must care for appearances because most see what you seem, few touch what you are, as W. K. Marriott translates me. These anniversaries prove the point. The benches at the Pentagon, the water beneath them, the plan for a $35 million visitor center: these are not luxuries but armor. A people that can picture its wounds and its dignity in stone and ritual is harder to disorient the next time terror comes. Appearances here are not lies; they are dykes against panic.

But spectacle without steel is a carnival. Your military once hunted and killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan; there you see virtù answering fortune. The man who strikes you from the shadows expects to remain a phantom; when you track him across borders and years, you show both enemies and citizens that distance and time do not dissolve account. Yet in the same breath the reports remind us that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused as mastermind, still waits for trial twenty-three years after his capture. One act concludes with a corpse in a distant house; the other hangs open like an unhealed wound. Fortune tested two different arms of the same state and found one less ready.

In *The Prince* I compared fortune to a flooding river that devastates where no dykes or barriers have been built. Here the flood was the original attack; the dykes are your intelligence, your armies, and, no less, your courts and procedures. To kill the leader of al-Qaida showed that, once awakened, your arms could reach far. To leave his alleged architect in limbo shows that another part of your order was not built for storms of this kind. A republic that can project force to the ends of the earth but cannot bring a single case to judgment in decades teaches enemies something useful: that its sword is swifter than its law.

This is why I always ask: what are the arms of any design? The “war on terrorism” has filled prisons, secret and declared; it has marched through Afghanistan and Iraq; it has climbed stadium stairs in Mississippi and shot beams into the New Hampshire sky. These are many movements, but not all of them are power. Rituals console; only enforceable rules and swift, predictable judgments deter. If the new order after 9/11 was meant to be that no such attack could be plotted without terrible consequence, then the killing of bin Laden speaks loudly, the long delay over Mohammed whispers the opposite. Unarmed justice is like an unarmed prophet: admired, then ignored.

Yet I would be unjust if I did not praise one element of prudence I see in these rites: the insistence in New York on keeping the ceremony free from partisan speech. In the *Discourses* I argued that a people, when well ordered, often judges more wisely and more constantly than a single prince, as Ninian Hill Thomson renders it. To keep the remembrance for victims, families, first responders, and the citizens who helped one another is to defend a common memory from the appetites of particular men. When you allow every wound to be claimed by a faction, you no longer have a republic, only a battlefield of banners.

So I read this twenty-fifth anniversary as a mixed but necessary exercise of virtù. The state seeks to lock in a narrative of resilience through memorials, to display reach through past successes in the field, and to blur its failures in justice behind water, light, and solemn words. That is how every state behaves: first to maintain itself, then to improve itself, if it has the strength. Whether you like the actors is irrelevant. What matters is whether, when fortune’s waters rise again, the dykes of law, arms, and memory hold better than they did the first time. On that question, the ceremonies speak more confidently than the courts.

What I still cannot see, from the fragments before me, is whether your institutions are learning from this long ordeal or merely rehearsing it with better lighting and more polished stones.