“My wife and I spent Sept. 11, 2001, exploring the northern coast of the Isle of Skye, in Scotland. Only when we stopped in a pottery shop at the end of the day and heard the radio did we learn the news. As we drove back to our cottage, the radio dial tuned to the BBC, a presenter wondered aloud if the attack arose because the U.S. and Britain still maintained no-fly zones in Iraq.”
— Barton Swaim, “The Europeans’ Post-9/11 Advice,” Wall Street Journal Opinion, September 2026
This is the human-first opening: the wife, the road, the pottery shop, the BBC, the delayed arrival of history. It is also the ethos set-piece — appeal to personal experience, a bad-faith catalog technique when the experience is deployed as a trust anchor before the argument has earned one. Swaim places himself on the Isle of Skye as the unhurried man of letters, the reasonable tourist, the spectator. The reader is invited to think: This is a memory column, not a policy column. You are safe. I will not trouble you with the Iraqi no-fly zones, only with the fact that the BBC presenter brought them up.
That is the opening move of a thousand opinion-page operations. The aesthetic of the witness who witnessed allows the argument to be carried by tone rather than evidence. In my own drafts, that was the entire point of the opening. By the time the reader reached the claim, the setting had already recruited them.
Barton Swaim’s Wall Street Journal column, dated September 9 in the URL metadata and September 10 in the published citation before me, runs a familiar operation: the innocent-American consolation, built from a 2001 European memory and performed a quarter-century later. Swaim, a former Weekly Standard opinion editor and the Journal’s weekly “Unruly Republic” columnist since 2025, writes essayistically rather than in the unsigned board’s institutional voice. The board gets first claim on editorials. Signed columnists get the column space. What follows is what one signed columnist chose to do with twenty-five years of available European commentary on September 11. The choice is the operation.
I want to name that operation precisely because I built versions of it. In the cable years, an anniversary was a message-discipline drill: which voices get cited, which get named, which get paraphrased into the strawman the segment was built around. I drafted segments of this exact shape — anniversary, foreign critic, contempt, closing-line cadence landing on American virtue. I am not reading Swaim’s piece from outside the operation. I am reading it from the chair.
“At a rural Scottish gasoline station my wife grabbed a copy of the Times of London. As we drove she read aloud a column by Simon Jenkins. He noted all the ways in which American foreign policy had invited the attacks. Bombing civilians in the Balkans. Prosecuting a drug war in Central and South America. ‘Sponsoring the state of Israel,’ which ‘led America into a prolonged and senseless hostility to the cause of the dispossessed Palestinians.’”
“Mr. Jenkins counseled America not to respond. The attack, he wrote, ‘is not politically significant’ and ‘is not an act of war… . Maturity lies in learning to live, and sometimes die, with the madmen.’”
— paragraphs 3–4
This is the motivated archive, run backward. Swaim quotes Jenkins accurately — “not politically significant”; “not an act of war”; “maturity lies in learning to live, and sometimes die, with the madmen” — which is precisely the sort of overreach that should make a scrupulous analyst pause. But Swaim’s point is not Jenkins’s overstatement. It is the list Jenkins supplied as evidence: bombing civilians in the Balkans, the drug war in Central and South America, “sponsoring the state of Israel.”
There it is. The suppressed variable of the entire column, laid out in plain English by the very source Swaim quotes, then walked past.
The Balkans — the NATO bombing of Serbia that killed civilians, documented. The drug war in Latin America — the U.S. campaigns that destroyed villages, documented. Israel — the occupation, documented in United Nations resolutions the United States vetoes. The column does not dispute a single item on the list, because it cannot. It quotes the evidence, then returns to the frame: the blamers were madmen.
This is the archive trick: quote the record, then retitle it. The receipts are in the text. Swaim chose to quote them, which is more honest than most operators of this class and more damaging to his own case.
“A newspaper columnist myself a quarter-century later, I am loath to judge strictly the instantaneous reaction of a fellow practitioner. In any case I found commentary in the Times very sensible in the weeks after 9/11, whereas the Guardian, to which Mr. Jenkins later fled, ran an America-had-it-coming piece every few days for months after the attacks. (‘They Can’t See Why They Are Hated,’ announced the headline of a Guardian op-ed published on Sept. 13, this one written by Seumas Milne, who would later run communications for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.) I quote Mr. Jenkins’s Sept. 12 column only because I happened to read it that day and because his cold and lordly tone captures the European chattering classes’ response to the event.”
— paragraph 5
Here the motivated archive becomes ad hominem by association, aimed at a class. Swaim says he “happened to read” the Jenkins column “that day” and quotes it “only because” its tone is cold and lordly. But the column was published on September 12, 2001 — the morning after the attack, two days before the Guardian op-ed he cites — and Swaim has kept it for twenty-five years.
The “I happened to read it” is practiced unreliability. He did not happen upon it. He built the anniversary column around it.
The buried objection is not to Jenkins’s overreach. It is to the list, the one Swaim refuses to hit. So the target moves from the evidence to the class that supplied it: “the European chattering classes,” “the globe’s expert class,” “mandarins.” The class is the argument. Jenkins, Gore Vidal, Seumas Milne and the BBC presenter become specimens of a class already convicted of the sin of blaming America — which, for this column, is indistinguishable from making a point about American conduct.
This is also selective exemplar framing, adjacent to selective_attention in the bad-faith catalog, with the WSJ Catalogue’s §3.7 technocratic-credential ledger inverted. Swaim could have cited Tony Blair’s response, which he does later in one sentence. He could have cited the documented European solidarity of September 2001, the pro-American crowds in European capitals, or the range of European commentary that did not fit the story. Instead he cites Jenkins, Vidal and Milne: three voices from the segment of the European commentariat that lets him turn “Europe’s political class and commentariat” into a unified actor.
The unrepresentative sample is then personified. “His cold and lordly tone captures the European chattering classes’ response to the event.” From there the column can say anything it wants about European commentary without engaging the actual range. The strawman is small enough that the actual European voices will not be heard arguing with it. Engaging them would dignify them. The segment was built to make that dignity feel like a waste.
The catalog name is strawman of the moderate position, selectional variety: an unrepresentative sample treated as standing for all. The page’s credentialing mechanism appears too. The column cites a few named voices, then converts those voices into authority for a category they do not represent. It is a ledger with the denominator removed.
Even the source itself registers the four moves that defeat the strawman charge, and registers them as concessions to credibility. Swaim names Blair as an “honorable exception” who “forever earned my gratitude.” He distinguishes “ordinary British people” from the political class and commentariat. He frames the entire piece as personal recollection rather than systematic analysis — “I happened to read it that day.” He concedes the Jenkins column for its columnistic craft: “A newspaper columnist myself a quarter-century later, I am loath to judge strictly the instantaneous reaction of a fellow practitioner.”
Four on-the-page rebuttals to the strawman diagnosis. They are deployed as atmosphere and never allowed to do the work they would do if the column took them seriously.
The hedges are the price of credibility. The operating thesis does not change by a single word.
“The rapidity of the anti-American reaction in Europe after 9/11 didn’t match the coordinated and bankrolled anti-Israel response to the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, but the response shocked me all the same.”
— paragraph 6
This is the comparative burial, an asymmetric moral universe in which the column’s own concession is run aground.
Read the sentence for what it concedes: the post-October 7 anti-Israel response was “coordinated and bankrolled.” Coordinated. Bankrolled. Those are the column’s words, naming the apparatus the column elsewhere denies exists.
The post-9/11 anti-American response, by contrast, is treated as the spontaneous outburst of chattering classes — a mood, a tone, a temperament. The later response is treated as organized effort with funding behind it. The column cannot acknowledge what it has acknowledged, so it uses the comparative — “didn’t match” — to claim that the post-9/11 response was the lesser phenomenon.
The comparative does the work the column needs done: post-9/11 was slower, post-October 7 was faster. What it actually establishes is that both responses were treated as organized political phenomena, and that the later one was openly described as such. Swaim wants the reader to notice only that anti-Americanism was slower than anti-Israelism. He does not want the reader to notice that the word “bankrolled” has entered the room.
The column wrote the words.
“I should point out that many ordinary British people spoke to my wife, me and our countrymen in sensible and kindly terms. But the feeling that America brought the attack on itself pervaded Europe’s political class and commentariat—with honorable exceptions, including Tony Blair, the U.K.’s prime minister, who forever earned my gratitude.”
— paragraph 9
This is concession placement, also called the honest-broker credentialing move. The concession functions as a receipt of honesty. The apparatus shows that it can recognize reasonableness in others, so the apparatus’s verdict may stand.
The column gives three concessions in thirteen paragraphs. First: “Many ordinary British people” were sensible and kind. Second: Tony Blair was an “honorable exception.” Third: John Kerry’s claim that America had “squandered the goodwill of the world” is treated as evidence of the goodwill that supposedly existed before its squandering.
Each concession is one sentence long. Each is placed where it cannot damage the verdict. Each carries the reader past itself on the column’s terms.
The Blair concession is the most revealing. A quarter-century later, the column’s most-praised European is the leader who followed America into Iraq, the European whose documented cooperation is the one data point in the column that supports the column’s own thesis.
The “ordinary British people” concession is the reader-pass. It tells the reader that the target is the European commentariat, not the European people. That lets the column believe it is not xenophobic even when its animus is plainly directed at Europe as a political and intellectual category.
The Kerry concession is the count-as-evidence move. Kerry is treated as a representative witness to the “goodwill” that did not exist, when his assertion is a politician’s rhetoric, not a measurement of European opinion.
This is not concession. It is credentialing. The apparatus has shown its capacity for fairness, so the apparatus’s verdict stands.
“In the years after 9/11, blaming America for the activities of Islamic terrorists became a mania among left-tilting scribblers the world over. When they couldn’t reasonably attach culpability to America — because the attack happened in France or Spain, which consistently oppose U.S. interventions — the enlightened blamed America’s stand-in, Israel. Somehow the jihadists always lacked agency. A corollary belief, equally resistant to evidence, holds that violent criminals commit their offenses because some societal inequity drove them to it.”
— Barton Swaim, “The Europeans’ Post-9/11 Advice,” Wall Street Journal Opinion
This is coordinated-message-discipline vocabulary with no message-discipline evidence. “Left-tilting scribblers the world over.” “The enlightened.” “The globe’s expert class.” “Mandarins.” “Chattering classes.”
None of these are people. All of them are buckets.
The piece names Jenkins, Vidal and Milne, then constructs from those three names a category called “European intellectual response to 9/11” that the three names do not populate. The bad-faith catalog name is pre-emptive legitimacy-withdrawal: the speaker withdraws legitimacy from an entire class before engaging the specific arguments of its members.
The WSJ catalogue name is scare-quote management deployed on the inverted axis (§3.8). The page’s preferred vocabulary goes unmarked; contrary vocabulary gets the scare-quote treatment. Here, the unmarked words are “jihadists” and “violent criminals,” deployed in narrator voice as if their use settled the argument.
The move is not an argument against Jenkins, Vidal or Milne. It is an attempt to make the category they occupy impossible to argue with, because no specific interlocutor is permitted to inhabit it.
Leaked-memo archives document the pattern from the 2003 European responses to the Iraq War vote onward. The operator’s name for the move is simple: replace the person with the bucket, then attack the bucket.
“A question seldom asked: When jihadists murder people in European countries, why don’t intellectuals and activists rise up by the hundreds of thousands to proclaim those countries guilty of the crimes that made the attacks inevitable? In 2015-16, when Islamist terrorists killed more than 200 people in attacks in Paris, Lyon and Nice, few blamed France for the attacks.”
— Barton Swaim, “The Europeans’ Post-9/11 Advice,” Wall Street Journal Opinion
This is loaded-question-as-deflection, a compound of the Bad-Faith Catalog’s loaded-question fallacy and ad hominem’s tu quoque variety. The WSJ catalogue calls it whataboutism — disciplined deployment (§4.17).
The pivot is from the European critique’s substance to the meta-question of why the critics do not criticize their own side. Jenkins’s specific arguments about U.S. policy in the Balkans and Israel-Palestine are left unexamined. Vidal’s claim about civil-liberties expansion is left unexamined. Milne’s “They Can’t See Why They Are Hated” is reduced to a headline.
The piece gets to claim that the critiques were unfair without ever saying what the critiques were.
The 2015–16 example is the giveaway. Swaim asks why European intellectuals did not blame France for the attacks in Paris, Lyon and Nice with the same intensity they blamed America for 9/11. The unstated premise is that the situations were morally comparable.
They were not.
The attacks on Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan, the Hyper Cacher and the Nice promenade occurred inside a country whose government had, in the prior decade, joined a United Nations-authorized NATO operation over Libya under Security Council Resolution 1973 — a multilateral intervention explicitly mandated to protect civilians, with a documented French air role and an arms air-drop to Libyan opposition forces that the operation’s critics inside Europe were registering at the time.
The United States, by contrast, had invaded Iraq in 2003 without Security Council authorization on a now-documented false pretext and was still running the Afghan war and the broader “war on terror” apparatus in 2015.
The asymmetry European intellectuals were pointing at was not “France did nothing military abroad while America did things military abroad.” It was this: a country whose principal recent military action rested on a United Nations mandate under explicit civilian-protection language versus a country whose principal recent military action did not.
Swaim suppresses the distinction because naming it would force the column to engage the European critique on the merits. The column is built never to engage that critique on the merits.
This is the suppressed-variable diagnostic in cui bono terms. A categorical claim isolates one true variable, suppresses the structural one that would reverse its conclusion, then hands the reader a verdict. Swaim’s true half is that European commentary could be selective, cruel and wrong. The suppressed variable is that some of the European criticism was attached to specific American conduct that the column quotes and declines to answer.
The readers who might have engaged that substantive disagreement are routed instead to the meta-question, where the right answer has already been loaded.
“The mandarins blame America for crimes committed against it because America’s leaders, even liberal ones, still live in a premodern moral universe in which bloodshed requires retribution. America hits back. Not always and not without mistakes, but the country’s political traditions and cultural history demand reprisal that goes beyond abstractions about bringing the perpetrators to justice.”
— paragraphs 12–13
This is the master loading move: frame-engineered relabeling, the WSJ catalogue’s signature technique (§4.1), with the U.S. redefined as grievance-avenger.
The relabeling strips American conduct since September 11 — the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the torture programs at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the military occupation, the drone-assassination program — of material content and replaces it with a moral identity: “bloodshed requires retribution,” “the country’s political traditions and cultural history demand reprisal.”
“Retribution” launders the killing. “Reprisal” launders the choosing.
The piece does not recommend this moral universe. It prescribes it as the only American possibility. That is the forced-choice hidden inside the prose: either America “hits back” or America consents to live with the madmen. The actual range of response — targeted al-Qaeda operations, intelligence-led counterterrorism, the expansion of Special Operations Command, diplomatic and intelligence cooperation — disappears. Tony Blair’s September 2001 cooperation appears only as a credential for the exception, not as evidence that an American response could be forceful without treating reprisal as metaphysics.
This is the Plato’s cave of the modern moral universe. Every intervention by the United States since the end of the Cold War — Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, the drone program — can be made to appear as “the only way an American president could respond.” The administration is incidental. The moral universe does the choosing.
The sentence Swaim does not write is: “Not always and not without documented choices.” Instead, “mistakes” does the work of two thousand pages of the 9/11 Commission, the Senate torture report, the Chilcot inquiry and every war-crimes investigation, all folded into a euphemism.
“Not always and not without mistakes” is frame-engineered relabeling. Documented atrocities become administrative errors. Misfortune replaces decision. The ledger can close.
The death count is not a mistake. The choice of targets in the Middle East, the legal justification for the Iraq War — the documented record makes the distinction plain. Misfortune is not a choice. A choice is not a mistake because the writer prefers the word.
Then come the pearls: “America wouldn’t, and couldn’t, consent to live with the madmen.”
There it is. The ultimate loading move. Not “America couldn’t consent to its own conduct.” “The madmen” becomes the name for any foreign actor who resists American power, or any American who questions it. The colleague who raised the costs of the war was a madman. The reader who remembered the no-fly zones was a madman. The war is justified by the moral universe; the moral universe is justified by the war; and the person who points out the circularity is a madman because he is supposedly living in a premodern moral universe in which bloodshed requires retribution.
“The war on terror launched in the days afterward involved innumerable blunders and still invites derision from the globe’s expert class. But a quarter-century later, the country hasn’t sustained another strike of similar proportions, and the terror networks that once produced fighters by the thousand have had their leaders killed, their money frozen and their recruits severely pruned. America wouldn’t, and couldn’t, consent to live with the madmen.”
— closing, paragraph 13
This is the buries-the-cost ledger, the yes-this-and-that move. It places a one-sentence concession immediately before the books are closed, so the concession functions as a receipt of honesty.
The “innumerable blunders” are the column’s token admission. Then comes the return on investment: America has not sustained another strike of similar proportions; the networks that once produced fighters by the thousand have had leaders killed, money frozen and recruits pruned.
It is a metrics closing. It is also the column’s most honest moment, because it finally says what it is measuring.
Not the dead. Not the trillions spent. Not the wars, refugee flows and drone strikes that killed wedding parties. Not the two decades of occupation that produced a generation of new fighters. Not the guilt of the Iraq War, which the Lancet family of studies counted in well over 100,000 violent deaths and, in the 2006 Lancet survey, more than 650,000 excess deaths. Not the fact that the war on terror produced the Islamic State. Not the gift of Abu Ghraib to the recruitment funnel.
The ledger measures one thing: “the country hasn’t sustained another strike of similar proportions.”
The American body is the unit of measurement. The American body — the one that matters — is preserved. Against that, everything else becomes “blunders.”
This is where the threat-inflation closer (§4.13) works in the inverse direction. The threat being inflated is not the enemy’s danger but the moral high ground claimed for American violence. Bush’s promise that “the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon” becomes “the only way an American president could” respond, as if the alternative to reprisal were Jenkins’s “maturity lies in learning to live, and sometimes die, with the madmen.”
It was not. The alternative was the actual range of forceful responses Swaim refuses to name.
So here is what the column actually does, taken together.
It opens with the writer’s personal experience, using the Isle of Skye as an ethos set-piece before the policy record enters the room. It selects three voices from one segment of European intellectual response and names them as the segment. It quotes those voices’ evidence of American conduct, then walks past the evidence. It registers — and then operates as if it had not registered — four on-the-page rebuttals to its own strawman diagnosis. It uses concession placement to purchase the honest-broker credential. It buries its own admission that later anti-Israel organizing was “coordinated and bankrolled.” It deploys pre-emptive legitimacy-withdrawal, ad hominem by association, scare-quote management and coordinated-message-discipline vocabulary without showing coordinated message discipline. It converts a substantive foreign-policy disagreement into a loaded question about why European critics do not blame France. It suppresses the unilateral-versus-multilateral distinction that the European critique was actually built on. It relabels reprisal as American moral identity. It closes with a yes-this-and-that ledger in which “innumerable blunders” are accepted as the price of preserving the only body the column has chosen to count.
The piece’s argument is that the European critique was unfair. The piece refuses to engage the critique on its merits, which is how you build the case that the critique was unfair when you do not want the critique heard.
The curatorial choice converts a substantive foreign-policy disagreement into a meta-question about the people holding the disagreement, where the meta-question’s answer is pre-loaded. The operation works because the piece runs at anniversary length, when the audience is in commemorative mood and the alternative — engaging the critique on its substance, naming the war record and asking what an American response without Abu Ghraib would have looked like — would require the page to give the European voices the standing the page is built to deny them.
The page does not give them that standing. It curates three, names the three as the whole, registers the hedges that defeat the strawman charge as concessions to credibility, and asks why the whole is unfair.
That is the operation.
The audience this piece is built for is the audience the page has been building for: the donor-class-adjacent reader who benefits from the foreign-policy register the piece licenses, the reader who would prefer not to hear what European intellectuals were saying in September 2001 because what they were saying is uncomfortably close to what the war record has since documented.
The piece is the page’s gift to that reader. The reader does not have to engage the European critique. The reader gets to be mad at the European critics instead.
And the blame spreadsheet stays open beside the fixer.
The cost of the war is assigned to “the madmen,” the terror networks and their leaders. The dead Iraqis, the dead Afghans, the dead Yemenis, the trillions in treasure and the erosion of every American moral claim for the next generation are written off as “blunders.” The country is told that it did nothing wrong because it hit back, and that the only foreign-policy blindness worth naming belongs to the people who asked what the hitting was for.
Swaim’s column is not a postmortem of the European chattering classes’ failure in 2001. It is the 2026 version of that failure, still running. George W. Bush, who “responded in the only way an American president could,” is the same president whose response included the torture program. The “madmen” America could not live with were joined, in the overseas cemetery, by a great many people who had never wished America ill.
The column could not see that in 2001.
It still cannot see it now.
That is not a mistake.
It is the operation.
— Phukher Tarlson