September 23, 2011
Ten Years after 9/11
A decade has now passed since that fateful day when 19 hijackers killed 3,000 people in a gruesome act of terrorism. It is rather hard now to precisely remember the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty that enveloped the country but that fear had terrible consequences not just for the United States, but for much of the world.
In medicine there is a condition known as septic shock, when a severe infection causes collapse of the circulation and often death. The irony of it is that it is not the infection itself that results in the lethal outcome, but the overwhelming activation of the immune system. The body kills itself by overreacting. In some ways the decade since 9/11 display a similarity to that process.
America, and specifically the Bush administration, badly misjudged the nature and scope of the terrorist threat. What they thought was that 9/11 was just the first round, that many further major attacks were being planned and were going to happen, and that the enemy had large number of supporters throughout the world and in the United States.
A frantic hunt for “sleeper cells” within the US yielded nothing, but a heavy spotlight of suspicion was cast on the US Muslim community. Meanwhile, it was just simply hard to believe that this massive attack was carried out by merely 19 men armed with boxcutters and some flight lessons and a murderous ideology. The whole operation cost less 500,000 dollars. While Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda carried it out, on some visceral level it was hard for Bush and for America also, to accept that the blame could be so narrowly drawn.
It was also hard to understand why the attacks had happened. “They hate us for our freedoms” was the early line that was put forth, that somehow America was attacked because America is so good. That was absurd on its face, the attacks had nothing to do with how America treated its own citizens. Bin Laden was intoxicated by his role in the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and its subsequent collapse. He truly believed he could do the same thing to the United States. Bin Laden’s goal was to turn the Muslim countries into “true Islamic states” and to liberate Palestine, but he felt that it was the US that prevented such an outcome by its support of pro-American dictators that crushed the Islamists in Egypt and elsewhere. If he could frighten the American people into abandoning US involvement in the Muslim world, the path would be open to reestablish a Muslim Caliphate, and reassert Muslim power and dignity in the modern world. While bin Laden tapped into real grievances that many Muslims shared, it did not mean that everyone who was critical of the US role in the Middle East was a hardcore supporter of Al-Qaeda.
There was a deep need at the time to really “strike back”, and the defeat of the Taliban accomplished with a few CIA agents and Special Forces along with the Northern Alliance and airpower, was just not enough to soothe the pains of 9/11. The escape of Osama bin Laden haunted Bush and America for another 10 years, until finally Obama ordered a risky helicopter attack that found and killed him.
Bush and the neo-conservatives under Cheney had a far more expansive theory of 9/11. It was due to the underlying deep pathologies in the Arab and Muslim world, and that much of that was due to a deficit of democracy, one that the Arabs themselves could never rectify. Based on this dubious set of ideas, there came one of the major justifications for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. While Saddam Hussein was on the short list of the world’s worst dictators, the invasion, and the subsequent bungled occupation, were illegitimate and a disaster for the US. Over 5000 Americans have died in Iraq, and the cost of the Iraq War is over two trillion dollars. Meanwhile, the Arab Spring has shown what a farce the US theory has been.
At home a massive Homeland Security apparatus was set up and hundreds of billions of dollars were spent. Fortifying the air transport system was essential, air travel would come to a halt if the threat of hijacking was not effectively ended. But outside of that much of the spending was pretty useless. Extra equipment for police departments in small towns or extra security guards at tall buildings were mostly a vast waste of money. In the 10 years since 9/11 there have been no clearly linked Al-Qaeda attacks in the US, and the few lone wolf episodes have resulted in a handful of deaths, the biggest being the Fort Hood shooting.
In the last ten years, there has not been a single suicide attack within the United States. No one ten years ago would have guessed that. 150,000 people have been murdered in America in the last ten years, less than 35 were due to Islamist terrorism of any sort. If the goal after 9/11 was to protect America, its citizens, and its way of life, it seems the cure was rather toxic. Comments can reach me at nail@socal.rr.com
