What is most striking about the eighth anniversary of the September 11 attacks may be its ordinariness. Certainly, memorials and moments of silence will be observed across the nation, as they should be, but life—and politics—goes on. Here inside the beltway, we are focused on the roiling healthcare debate, the looming risk of a swine flu pandemic, and ongoing economic malaise. On the national security front, we are gradually bringing the War in Iraq to a close, while we gear up for a sustained conflict in Afghanistan and draw near a deadline for Iran to return to the nuclear negotiating table.

The 9/11 Anniversary stirs a mixture of feelings. On the one hand, the shock and horror of that day are beginning to fade into historical memory. Millions of pages and pixels of retrospective on the attacks, their causes and aftermath, have been published; the Pentagon is fully repaired; even the World Trade Center site is once more under construction. So in that sense, life in America has gone back to normal.

On the other hand, the trauma of 9/11 brought about a permanent shift in our national priorities. No longer can intelligence officials or policymakers afford to dismiss out of hand security threats that may at first seem incredible—after all, who would imagine that terrorists could hijack a commercial airliner using box cutters, and then transform it into a guided missile powerful enough to bring down a skyscraper? And no longer can we wait to connect the dots between terrorist cells, crackpot dictators, and black market traffickers. It may be that 9/11 forced an end to the era of American uncertainty about globalization. If nothing else, today, we can be sure that what happens in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, in a refugee camp on the Horn of Africa, or at a crumbling research lab in Eastern Siberia, deserve our attention.

On this anniversary, our first duty is to remember and honor the victims of 9/11. But as the emotional immediacy of the tragedy inevitably fades, our resolve, our constant vigilance, and our heightened awareness of interconnected threats in a globalized world must endure.

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