March 2002: Bush Official Says 9/11 Is Important Because It Lowers Public Resistance to US Military Adventures

An anonymous senior Bush administration official says, as The New Yorker paraphrases it, “Inside government, the reason September 11th appears to have been ‘a transformative moment,’… is not so much that it revealed the existence of a threat of which officials had previously been unaware as that it drastically reduced the American public’s usual resistance to American military involvement overseas, at least for a while.”
[New Yorker, 4/1/2002]