Six years later

September 11, 2007

I’ve struggled a bit the last few Septembers to write about the anniversary of 9/11. On the one hand, it feels impossible to ignore the significance of the date and the events that transpired in 2001. On the other hand, there’s very little left to be said.

Matt Yglesias said, “The anniversary post is always the hardest one to write…. It’s hard for me to contemplate, and one wants to do writing worthy of the magnitude of the thing and I’m not sure I can.”

I agree wholeheartedly. Fortunately, Salon’s Gary Kamiya is up to the task and has an excellent piece on the sixth anniversary of the attacks, exploring the lessons of the 9/11.

Six years ago, Islamist terrorists attacked the United States, killing almost 3,000 people. President Bush used the attacks to justify his 2003 invasion of Iraq. And he has been using 9/11 ever since to scare Americans into supporting his “war on terror.” He has incessantly linked the words “al-Qaida” and “Iraq,” a Pavlovian device to make us whimper with fear at the mere idea of withdrawing. In a recent speech about Iraq, he mentioned al-Qaida 95 times. No matter that jihadists in Iraq are not the same group that attacked the U.S., or that their numbers and effectiveness have been greatly exaggerated. It’s no surprise that Gen. David Petraeus’ “anxiously awaited” evaluation of the war is to be given on the 10th and 11th of September. The not-so-subliminal message: We must do what Bush and Petraeus say or risk another 9/11.

Petraeus’ evaluation can only be “anxiously awaited” by people who are still anxiously waiting for Godot. We know what will happen next because we’ve been watching this movie for eight months. Gen. Petraeus, Bush’s mighty-me, will insist that we’re making guarded progress. Bush, whose keen grasp of military reality is reflected in his recent boast that “we’re kicking ass” in Iraq, will promise that he will reassess the situation in April. The Democrats will flail their puny arms, the zombie Republicans will keep following orders, and the troops will stay.

So let’s forget the absurd debate about “progress” and whether a bullet in the front of the head is better than one in the back, and how much we can trust our new friends from Saddam’s Fedayeen. On the anniversary of 9/11, we need to ask more basic questions — not just about why we can’t bring ourselves to pull out of Iraq, but why we invaded it in the first place. Those questions lead directly to 9/11, and the ideas and assumptions behind our response to it.

Good idea.

Kamiya’s piece is worth reading in its entirety, but he’s strongest when highlighting what the last six years say about us.

Sept. 11 was a hinge in history, a fork in the road. It presented us with a choice. We could find out who attacked us, surgically defeat them, address the underlying problems in the Middle East, and make use of the outpouring of global sympathy to pull the rest of the world closer to us. Or we could lash out blindly and self-righteously, insist that the only problems in the Middle East were created by “extremists,” demonize an entire culture and make millions of new enemies.

Like a vibration that causes a bridge to collapse, the 9/11 attacks exposed grave weaknesses in our nation’s defenses, our national institutions and ultimately our national character. Many more Americans have now died in a needless war in Iraq than were killed in the terror attacks, and tens of thousands more grievously wounded. Billions of dollars have been wasted. America’s moral authority, more precious than gold, has been tarnished by torture and lies and the erosion of our liberties. The world despises us to an unprecedented degree. An entire country has been wrecked. The Middle East is ready to explode. And the threat of terrorism, which the war was intended to remove, is much greater than it was.

All of this flowed from our response to 9/11. And so, six years later, we need to do more than mourn the dead. We need to acknowledge the blindness and bigotry that drove our response. Until we do, not only will the stalemate over Iraq persist, but our entire Middle Eastern policy will continue down the road to ruin.

Indeed.

The Democrats will flail their puny arms, the zombie Republicans will keep following orders, and the troops will stay.

All true. And I really like the use of the term “zombie Republicans”. I think this is a phrase that should be used over and over again, because it takes away the (illusionary) idea that Republicans have some sort of “power” or “strength” that they keep trying to portray in the media. No. They are powerless, spineless, brainless automatons repeating the same mantra over and over. Only there mantra isn’t “Brains…must eat brains” its “9/11…al-Qaida…Iraq”.

Let’s remember those who died on 9/11 by demanding that our government be representative of the American people….and not the special interests…like our founding fathers demanded. As the Declaration of Independence states:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

  • From an historical prospective, what can be deduced from the fact that when the Leader of the Free World came to THIS fork in the road, he chose to veer off on some unrelated tangential path, never turned around, never looked back, just kept on going.

    The mess in Iraq serves no one, accomplishes nothing and is costing us everything.

  • I was listening to Rush today (yeah, I know, but I enjoy a good helping of fascist propaganda now and then), and he was of course rambling on and on about how libruls are ruining the country, etc., etc. But, at one point, he was talking about how he wanted the events of 9/11 to be seared into our minds forever, how the feelings we felt that day should be remembered every day and for them to guide us in our war against the evil brown people.

    All I could do was say to myself: That is exactly the problem. That’s exactly how we got into this mess in the first place…

    How on earth we can take a horrible event like 9/11 and make it worse just astounds me.

  • On this September 11th, I urge you all to raise your awareness of the events of 9/11 and the government’s official exposition into the events of 9/11. I urge you to read the 9/11 Commission Report. I urge you to watch the exceptional documentary, 9/11: Press for Truth, that chronicles the account of the patriotic women known as “the Jersey Girls,” who successfully lobbied Congress for the creation of the 9/11 Commission (there was staunch resistance from the Bush Administration, surprise).

    Lastly, $15M was allocated for the 9/11 Commission –whereas Mike Vick was paid $23M in 2005. Where are our priorities? Do not the events of 9/11 deserve our scrutiny? 9/11 was as much a psychological attack as it was a physical attack –we all suffered the psychological trauma of terror on 9/11. Indeed, never forget, and never let history forget.

  • President Bush entered office with the privately expressed desire to go to war in Iraq, and 9/11 gave him the opportunity to do so. It wasn’t a matter of “national character”, but of the character of the man who made the decision to go to war in Iraq on the basis of half-truths and outright lies. I don’t expect the average citizen of this country to have a lot of knowledge about foreign affairs and national security, which is why Bush was able to be re-elected in 2004. I doubt his party’s nominee in 2008 will be elected, and I hope the Democrats start preparing the public now for a less than sweet end to a needless war.

  • I think today is the best day to remind all your wingnut friends that George W Bush once said “I truly am not that concerned about [Osama bin Laden]”… “I don’t know where he is. You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him”

    He said that on March 13, 2002*. Of course we now know what he was spending a lot of time on; his plans to invade Iraq. And only a few months after Bush revealed his disinterest in bin Laden, he began to connect 9/11 with bin Laden’s enemy, Saddam Hussein.

    IMHO, if bin Laden had been eliminated, America’s thirst for revenge would have been slaked and Bush might have failed to trick the country into attacking Iraq. So IMO bin Laden didn’t escape by accident. He needed us to remain pissed about 9/11 so he could use that anger for his own purposes. And guess what… He’s still doing that with the remaining koolaid drinkers. So remind them what he said. Send them the link.

    And here we are, five years later. bin Laden is still out there, making videos, encouraging every other would-be terrorist by just being alive. And Bush is still acting like he cares about the people who died on 9/11.

    * Read it at the Whitehouse website:
    http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/03/20020313-8.html

  • We don’t know what really happened on 9-11. The official story is just as dubious as the notion that Iraq was involved. There’s something very fishy going on.

  • We don’t know what really happened on 9-11. The official story is just as dubious as the notion that Iraq was involved. There’s something very fishy going on.

    Unfortunately we do, and its emotionally just too hard for many people to comprehend (do you want to admit that a country so powerful could be hurt so easily). Our country was attacked, we had warnings, they were ignored (either due to ignorance or malfeasance, thats the only question.)

    See, its easy. Occum’s razor and all. Any attempts to try and expand 9/11 into something more than it was, only makes it worse for that person to have closure, and only takes them further from the truth.

    What happened the in the years after, is only too sad to think about.

  • We should never forget that we were able to be hit because we are a free and open society. That freedom and openess may make us vulnerable, but it should never make us less courageous or remake us into an authoritarian shadow of ourselves.

  • I do not think 9/11 will be remembered in the same way as Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor forced our entry into World War II and caused us to begin naval operations with an inferior navy. The more we learn about 9/11 the more staged our response appears. The FBI had intercepted enough communications to know that planes were about to be flown into buildings. They knew within a few weeks of when that would happen. The loss of life inflicted and buildings destroyed did nothing to impair our ability to retaliate. What did happen was the loss of the country to the military-industrial-white house complex.

    Personally I resent the attention given to 9/11. It happened, it could have been avoided, and more attempts will be made. Until the path to 9/11 is fully investigated and publicized I am looking at 9/11 as just another day of the Bush regime.

  • It makes no sense that after the horrific mass killing that was 9/11 that we honor those that died that day by laying an even greater,and ever-growing, number of caskets on a sacrificial altar in their memory. If ever a day existed where this world should have learned the lesson that killing people to win a Pyrrhic victory, to prove an ideology or religious persuasion superior or to just kill people “because we can” are morally defunct premises, we as a nation instead ignored those lessons and did exactly what Osama would have done if he were in our place. I hope one day the lesson of 9/11 will sink in and we can honor the dead not by killing more people who didn’t cause that event but by doing the right thing instead.

  • Eisenhower wanted to call it the military industrial Congressional complex , he decided it was too harsh

  • I look back at 9/11 as a national gut check that we failed. In a time of crisis, the nation looked to it’s president and found a coward cloaked in a false bravado. Rather than calling upon the best of us, he and his administration appealed to the worst — fear — using it to consolidate its own power and achieve its own ends. In the process, our president created an atmosphere of mass insanity the likes of which I never thought was possible in my country. I am sickened, embarrassed, ashamed, and pissed as hell. I will never forget 9/11 nor will I ever forgive those who offered only fear in the moment of our distress.

  • Another extremely accurate and appropriate essay on 9/11 may be found at the Rude Pundit’s site today. It’s not for the kiddies, but does capture the horror and shame of what we’ve done in the last six years extraordinarily well.

  • I’ve struggled a bit the last few Septembers to write about the anniversary of 9/11. On the one hand, it feels impossible to ignore the significance of the date and the events that transpired in 2001. On the other hand, there’s very little left to be said. — CB

    It’s been only 6 yrs, CB, even if it feels like 60… In Poland, there’s been a moment of (national) silence every September 1, since 1945 — 62 years. Which makes me wonder… If and when Iraq becomes an independent country again, will it commemorate, with a minute of national silence, the day US invaded it? The darkest hour in its history? And for how long? With our might, we have wreaked more havoc, in mere 4+ yrs, than Saddam managed in 25.

    “Bush, whose keen grasp of military reality is reflected in his recent boast that “we’re kicking ass” in Iraq, will promise that he will reassess the situation in April.” — Gary Kamiya

    The first, no doubt. April Fool, everyone! heh, heh, heh…

  • Once more please forgive me for the length of this post.
    It is real easy to get lost in pondering over the almost endless details that this invasion and occupation of Iraq has produced and is fun to play intellectual but I am beginning to think that this is exactly what the people who are responsible for this mess want us to do. While we are busy discussing the reality, we are falling right into the trap that the people running this war want: lots of talk from people with no power and who can be ignored. Remember the statement that the unnamed “senior advisor” to President Bush made to a New York Times Magazine reporter last fall: “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”[6]
    We are thinking and talking short-term, they are thinking, talking and acting long-term.
    We need to start ignoring much of the details of their actions and begin to ask our own questions. Questions such as: what are the real reasons we are in Iraq and heading for a war with Iran? Is this course of action inevitable? Do we need to be an empire to live the kind of life we have now? What changes will we have to make if we are not able to make other countries follow our orders. What will we do if the dollar ceases to be the reserve currency of the world. How will we deal with Europe, China, Russia and perhaps Iran when we are no longer the strongest country on the planet? Are we willing to use nuclear weapons to maintain our power? Are we willing to risk becoming a wasteland as Germany was in 1945?
    I think America is really at a crossroads right now. We can bankrupt ourselves to become an empire or the 60 % of us who want out of Iraq must begin to plan a whole new type of future not based upon the corporate power of the “military industrial complex”. The people who are running this mess have all the power of ideas now and will prevail regardless of which party wins the elections unless the rest of us develop a coherent alternative for the future of this country.
    David Chisholm

  • we had warnings-Evinfuilt #9

    You mean from PNAC?

    do you want to admit that a country so powerful could be hurt so easily?

    I have no issue admitting that. Can you admit that history is replete with examples of monsters who killed thousands or even millions of innocent people for their own ends, and there’s no reason to think America can’t have its own such homegrown monsters?

    You think you know, but you don’t. You don’t.

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