Note: Started writing this on 9/12, then got distracted. Since
then the US financial system has continued to implode, while the media
chortles that the silver lining of depression is lower gas prices, and
the worst major party presidential candidate since James Buchanan (at
least) continues to hold even or better in the polls.
In looking that his year's crop of 9/11 observations, it strikes me
that people make more of it than is deserved, and still miss some very
basic points.
Nations that respect the rights of all of their people, and
respect the independence of all other nations, are never targets of
terrorist violence. As 9/11 showed, the US was no such nation.
The only appropriate response to an act of terrorism is to
examine the history that provided the pretext, and to make amends to
render that pretext obsolete. The US did not do this, and nearly all
Americans to this day have no clear idea why Americans were attacked.
Even those Americans who recognize that the US projects imperial power
and significant hegemony far beyond our borders often fail to see any
connection to Americans being targeted by terrorists.
The actual US response, which was to attack and overthrow the
government of Afghanistan, was possible only because the US possessed
military capability far beyond any reasonable defensive needs. No
other nation could have lashed out like the US did because no other
nation had the wherewithal. (Given how Afghanistan worked out, the US
may not have had the capability either, but the Bush administration,
and most Americans, thought it did.)
The US reaction validated the terrorists' rationale. Had the
US responded within the procedures of international law, admitting
redress for just grievances, we would have shown the terrorists to
be mere criminals. Instead, we admitted their case and added to its
rationale.
The US reaction was predicated on two unexamined assumptions:
1) that the US has a right to police the world, without any sort of
checks and balances; and 2) that when US authority was challenged
the only possible response was to reassert that authority even more
emphatically, which given the US military fetish meant more violently.
Given that violence is the most readily understood form of injustice,
we've only added to the store of rationales that terrorists use to
target us.
As America's knee-jerk violence increased it has exposed the
limits of American power, especially how incompetent the US is when
it comes to dominating and controlling people beyond US borders,
language, and culture. These failures exposed first the hollowness
of the superpower conceit and ultimately the viability of the whole
imperial venture.
The ideology that underlies the US response to 9/11 is so
pervasive that any administration would likely have struck out the
same way, but the Bush administration, with its deep conservative
faith in power and private wealth, its corruption and cronyism,
its inability to conceive of government ever contributing to any
sort of public interest, has been especially disastrous. The full
extent of Bush's failure will take many years to reckon, and will
be hard for most people to fathom. We are buried in debt, because
we have lived the last few decades on the illusion that the rich
are responsible for wealth, rather than merely the recipients of
political favoritism. We are increasingly buried in ignorance --
a stance that becomes all the more precarious in a technological
society on the cutting edge of resource and complexity limits.
We have, for instance, seen such unthinkable things as more and
more people sinking below the poverty line, and life expectancy
shrinking.
The latter paragraph could go on and on, but let's go back to
the initial point and underline it: the initial US reaction to
9/11 was very peculiar, an irrational burst of violence that was
predicated on self-delusion. No other nation in the world would
have reacted in that way, yet to us it still seems as normal as
apple pie -- even after every step advancing the reaction has
proven to be an abject failure. Until we can get our minds around
this simple truth we will continue to blindly hurt ourselves and
everyone else around us, until we expire from our own failures.
It's happening, and it cannot be stopped until we face up to what
we have done. Unfortunately, our whole political system militates
against that sort of self-examination.
It is certainly true that some politicians are less blind and
less stupid and less deceitful and less arrogant than others, but
how can they be so and still sell optimism, which remains the coin
of the realm even as we slide into hell.
