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| Today's voice belongs to Contributing Editor motomynd |
Even the bush people living an aboriginal hunter-gatherer lifestyle in Africa know what happened 11 years ago today. Planes flying into buildings did not directly affect their daily roaming search for food, but the U.S. response did. Africa is the emerging front of the war against terrorism, and life there, like so many other places in the world, has gotten more dangerous and challenging these past 11 years. Even for people at the very bottom of the Third World scale, who were already subsisting on what few roots, berries, and grubs they could find.
The U.S. has spent trillions of dollars in the retaliation for 9/11. It has overthrown the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan and so destabilized the countries that they are even more dangerous places today than they were before 9/11. When Iraq was a sworn enemy of the U.S. it was more of an asset in keeping Iran and Syria in check than it is today as our alleged ally.
The U.S. has killed Osama bin Laden and many other terrorist leaders, but in the process it has damaged its standing in the world community and hacked away at the civil liberties of its own citizens. And as most of us are too painfully aware, the U.S. response to 9/11 helped create the largest economic disaster in this country since the Great Depression.
Taking out the emotion and looking at it from a logical perspective: Would the U.S. have been better off to have responded with some small special-ops strikes, repaired the physical damage from the 9/11 attacks, and otherwise ignored them?
Eleven years after the fact, Americans still get all worked up over the idea that some foreign entity dared to kill 2,740 Americans on our own soil. If Americans getting killed on our own soil is really such a big deal, then why do Americans barely blink as they kill approximately 40,000 of their own each year with their incompetent driving?
Yes, it is awful that 2,740 Americans died on 9/11. But how much more awful is it that since 9/11, Americans have killed more than 450,000 Americans simply because they won’t pay attention when behind the wheel?
Why hasn’t the U.S. been spending trillions of dollars on that significant daily problem, instead of being involved in the deaths of an estimated one million innocent people due to its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and its other actions around the world?
Just in case you are among those people who for some mysterious reason still believe the U.S. attacked Iraq because of its role in 9/11, here are the facts: There is not a shred of evidence that Iraq had anything at all to do with 9/11. The fact is that we the public may never know why the U.S. really attacked Iraq, but we do know it wasn’t because of 9/11.
If Osama bin Laden’s reason for the 9/11 attack was to destroy the American lifestyle, isn’t it fair to say he succeeded? Trying to undo that truth is like the South's trying to “unlose” the Civil War or America's attempting to “unlose” the Vietnam conflict.
Wouldn’t we be better off to face the fact that despite spending nearly $700 billion a year on defense, which is something like 42% of the world’s total military expenditures, the U.S. was taken down by a ragtag bunch with a reported $80,000 budget? In retrospect, wouldn’t we have been much better off to have devoted blood and treasure to rebuilding the American lifestyle, rather than repairing the American ego, and isn’t it high time we got on with that?
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Copyright © 2012 by motomynd
Opinions among Moristotle's staff members will differ sharply at times, and this is one of those times. For the record, I can find practically nothing in today's post with which I agree.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with Ken and with nothing in Motomynd's post.
ReplyDeleteIf only I could have batted .500 in baseball...
ReplyDeleteKen, I well understand your disagreement. In fact, in the first year after 9/11 I may have agreed with you. In the 10 years since, however, my perspective has changed. Do you fully support the way the U.S. has conducted itself since 9/11, or do you have another opinion on how things should have been handled?
I agree only with the assertion that Iraq played no role in the 9/11 attacks. Of course the U.S. has made domestic and foreign policy mistakes in the past 11 years, especially in its incompetent conduct of the Iraq War. None of those mistakes, however, supports any of the numerous misconceptions in your piece. The exercise of wrangling about them would serve no purpose.
ReplyDeleteIt's too bad more people do not see the last 11 years in this way. Construction, not destruction is what is needed. Yes, many die on our roads, but many more of our military die from "friendly fire". Stats that are covered up. How many citizens have our troops accidentally killed, by mistake, in those countries. We need Help right here right now!
ReplyDelete"But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" The past 11 years have, at best, done more damage to the legitimacy and respectability of the government of the United States than any rational person could have imagined. I'm not a bit "patriotic" and even I find myself amazed and disgusted. Motomynd has engaged in understatement.
ReplyDeleteTom, what has happened in the last 4 of the 11 years that "have done more to damage..."? Could this be exaggeration? Do you think it was understatement to say that "the U.S. was taken down..."? Is it an understatement to say that Osama bin Laden succeeded in destroying the American lifestyle? To what extent did the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks, precipitate the financial collapse of 2008? Funny, I've never heard an investigative journalist mention it. The housing bubble, Wall Street greed, lack of financial regulation... and our response to 9/11?? You must be thinking about the increase in the national debt, which of course did nothing to make people lose their homes. Last, do you see any hyperbole in comparing the planned murder of thousands to accidental deaths on the highway? Not to mention that highway deaths have been declining for 30 years, but that's beside the point. Just asking.
ReplyDeleteI am thinking more in terms of the spirit of the times, the increase in the intrusive surveillance powers, and the militarization of the local police in many towns with near impunity for their actions. That the past four years has not reversed that trend, and in some areas made it worse, is the major failing of the Obama years. On both international and national levels the continuation of the Bush/Cheney war on anybody who makes some authority figure nervous makes solving problems harder because who do you trust. I've been politically engaged for five decades, but now I turn away with disgust, and I have lots of company. The root problem is the last four years are more of the same, only harder to stomach.
DeleteTom, I have no personal experience with the intrusions into civil liberty that you describe. I've written and said some vehement things about our government and our society generally, and I've never heard boo from the authorities. Nor do I know anyone who has. Seems I'd be likely to notice "the major failing of the Obama years." All along I've been chalking it up to other things. It also strikes me that "the continuation of the Bush/Cheney war on anybody (italics mine) who makes an authority figure nervous" is hyperbole. Did you notice our reluctance to intervene in Egypt, our inexhaustible patience with Iran, and our hands-off position on Syria? I have no doubt that you have company in your disgust — I'm among them. However, my unhappiness with Obama has a different reason: his ineptitude at the reins of government.
DeleteWe are paying the price--and it's a very steep one--for a lot of muddle-headed thinking that is still evident in the current political campaign with the Republican's charging that Obama is not supportive of Israel. The very successful propaganda of a very small nation makes it impossible for our elected representatives to take a realistic position with respect to the whole Arab/Israel issue. Our neo-colonial relationship with the gulf states aggravates the problem further. The money they get from us for oil literally fuels the whole problem.Yet we have Obama attacked for his support of alternative energy and efforts to stem our dependence on it. And then we have that claque in our intelligence and military services that hold on tightly to the notion that we can do better than other colonial powers that meddled in these areas. This thinking gave us the war in Vietnam, Iraq, the ousting of a popular, but left wing president in Iran in the early 50's and the support for the Shah and his whole group. And this mess in Afghanistan is partially the result of our knee-jerk reaction to Russian colonialism. Don't forget that it was our money, other support, arms, etc. to Afghan elements that were fighting the communist regime installed by the Russians that gave the Taliban the sophistication to fight us once we decided we didn't like their style of independence. And why is it that the right wing can never say we were wrong in Vietnam, in meddling in Iranian politics in the early 1950's, and in getting involved in the Afghan civil war during the Russian support for the communist regime?
ReplyDeleteI agree that much of our foreign policy has been muddle-headed, but I believe the Obama administration has been pretty close to exemplary over its tenure. Tensions between Israel and Iran are indeed reaching a boiling point, and it looks like Netanyahu may become a factor in the presidential election.
ReplyDeleteI think you're mistaken on these points:
* The relationship between the gulf states and the U.S. is not "colonial." Colonies are subservient entities.
* Our foreign policy in the Middle East is far from oil-based. We got less than 15% of our oil from that region last year, and it will be less and less throughout this decade.
* The war in Vietnam was triggered by a dynamic — anti-Communist phobia — that is far behind us. It's similar to the war in Iraq only in that our intelligence apparatus exaggerates threats everywhere it looks.
* There is little continuity between the right wing of the 50's and today's right wing. They're now locked on to a different set of phobias: abortion, gun confiscation, European-style socialization, and the growing opposition to obscene wealth.
Motomynd covers a great deal of territory! In general I view 9/11 as a criminal act rather than an act of war. That we regarded it as an act of war is a result of our tribal politics. Had 9/11 been orchestrated by the Mafioso we would not have declared war on Italy, but it was OK to declare war on Iraq and Afghanistan even though there is no evidence that Iraq was involved, and Afghanistan was not a "country" in the way that we think of it. Italians are Europeans who (largely) worship with the same holy books we do. Afghans and Iraqis are brown-skinned (I suspect most people think of them all as Arabs) who worship a different holy book.
ReplyDeleteI'm not convinced this damaged our standing in the world appreciably. We have, since Richard Nixon, been somewhat of a loose cannon in diplomatic circles. That hasn't changed. (Did I like Richard Nixon? No, but Henry Kissinger's "Spheres of Influence" was the last coherent non-reactive foreign policy this country had.) Diplomacy is, in part, predicated on predictability, and predictable we are not—at least in any good sense. We of the left use the term "reactionary" very loosely without acknowledging that our foreign policy is just as reactionary as it was under Ronald Reagan.
It's difficult to deal with the equation of "the number of people killed" and how it should be related to the "amount of money spent." I'm not sure it's one I can affectively accept. We tend to spend money depending on our degree of outrage (9/11, Katrina, the superfund sites), no doubt in some sense to placate our own sense of not having anticipated an event. Too, people killed in auto accidents are, for the most part, perceived as having some complicity in their own deaths (rightly or wrongly) whereas the victims of 9/11 were true innocents.
There is very little evidence, as many above cite, other than Bush/Cheney defenses at the time, that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. Our counterreactions do seem out of whack and disproportional and from a geopolitical and economic view, not very satisfying. What military action have we engaged in since World War II that leaves us psychologically, morally, or emotionally satisfied? If national policy were to withdraw form Aghanistan tomorrow, I wouldn't be dismayed, and polls seem to suggest millions of Americans would move on. To compare foreign policy or wars or costs to the death toll from auto accidents seems to me, above all, a rather weak arguing technique. We think of everything so differently from auto accidents. We don't like auto accidents, we accept them. We don't support or call for a national policy to eliminate them (going back to horses, bicycles, and walking). Suppose one accident killed 3000 people. We'd be upset and want the driver fired. And that's about it. But we judge events by context and intent: somebody wanted to kill those 3000 people in NY, Washington and Pa. And so Americans wanted something done. Probably in a practical sense the right thing would have been just to focus on Al Qaeda and to arrest them, imprison them, defund them, and attack them as we might any other stateless group of criminals. In retrospect, that might have been the cheaper, more practical route.
ReplyDelete