9/12 Rant

Writing about the 9/11 anniversary is very difficult - I do not want to politicize it. Yet - it is well and truly politicized already. Nothing gets gained by unilateral disarmament here. So I held off a day - but now, you get the rant.

The attacks themselves were devastating - they put the fear of god into me, personally, and into most of us. But I have to bring out that Hammett quote again: we adjust to beams falling - and we adjust to beams not falling. Even the day of the attacks, I remember thinking, in the back of my mind, I will not always feel this way. The fear will pass. We get over devastation; we deal with consequences and move on.

Or not. The problem is that this attack happened while we were governed by a fool, who is surrounded by villains, who saw the attacks as an opportunity for a series of power grabs, at home and abroad. In doing so, they have seriously undermined our position in the world - and seriously undermined the strength and stability of our political system. And this villainy has warped what happened on 9/11/2001 - there is no way to talk about the attacks without talking about what they were used to justify, and how badly things have gone since. Most of the villainy - the war in Iraq, the attacks on the constitution, on international law - has nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks themselves. 9/11 led directly to the invasion of Afghanistan (which seems inevitable and right, though it has turned into a failure, almost as much as Iraq); it led to some pretty unwholesome laws (the Patriot Act, notably.) Otherwise though, most of what has happened - Iraq, our use of torture, secret prisons, Bush's claims of unlimited executive powers - had no direct relationship to 9/11 - it was used as an excuse, as emotional blackmail.

Politically - we have entered a dark period in our history, and one that is completely unnecessary. Terrorism, hitting us, is a bad thing - but it is a small thing, that can be controlled, if we take it seriously. Terrorists can't do anything to undermine our "way of life" (a thing that get bandied about quite a bit in these times.) They can kill us, cost us money, but they can't challenge the foundations of our society. (Unlike, say, Germany and Japan in WWII; or the USSR during the cold war.) If we are going to undermine our freedom, we have to do it ourselves. To our shame, we have. And undermined our international prestige, our reputation for being good guys, not to mention our reputation for invincibility. Our policies over the last five years have revealed our weakness, lack of seriousness, unwillingness to take risks or accept consequences for anything we consider valuable. The invasion of Iraq stands as a crowning example - the only explanation anyone can come up with that makes sense is that we wanted, simply, to make an example of them: we wanted to hurt someone real bad, so everyone else would cower before us. And to do that, we picked someone no one liked, someone who could not threaten us in any way - Iraq. And yep, we beat the shit out of them (their army at least): but then what? Once in there we couldn't walk away - and what has happened since - increasing violence, chaos, the whole thing hanging on the edge from civil war with god knows what consequences - was pretty damned predictable.

All of it, furthermore, not just unrelated to the "war on terror" (an idiotic phrase: christ, it's embarrassing to have to type it), but significantly counterproductive to the war on terror. Taking men and material out of Afghanistan (where Al Qaeda was still lurking, even after our invasion) to go after Iraq - and create more ill will than we could dream of, as well as killing thousands of Americans and Iraqis. It is vile.

And going back to 9/11: there was never much to be said about the attacks. They were an act of raw cruelty, for nothing - our mistake was probably to take the political pretensions of the terrorists seriously. It wasn't a meaningful attack - it said nothing about us as a country, other than that we're big. (Which makes calling the day "Patriot Day" doubly annoying - it wasn't about the US as a country. It was about the US as a target.) It had no meaning - what meaning it had (political or otherwise) came later. What we did about it, and how we explained it.... The right likes to make fun of the left for worrying about "why they hate us so" - but they are just as eager to explain it, to make the attackers seem coherent and serious. All that talk about how they hate our freedoms, all the dire warnings against radical Islam, or Islamism, or Islamic fascism - or just plain Islam, Arabs, whatever - is blather, self-inflation, making our enemy seem important, Important - World Historically Important. We had to make it meaningful: to find political motivations for the attacks, whether by wringing our hands about how awfully we’ve treated the world, or by imagining Bin Laden as a Supervillain in his Secret Bin Laden Cave, secretly infiltrating Your Neighborhood in the person of Mexicans and the Arabs who own the Red Apple on the corner. Rather than accept that a gang of thugs attacked us in the hopes of provoking a response they could use to enhance their own political ambitions, the right insists on inventing an enemy that will make them feel stronger for fighting. But by not treating them as the gangsters they are, by treating their political claims as if they had some validity - as if Bin Laden represented someone other than himself - we've done more harm, in the political* sense, than the attacks could.

And a big part of this is keeping the pain of 9/11 raw. We have to live in fear: they thrive on it. They need it - the GOP has made hash of the country - they need 9/11 and fear of terrorism (You thought Snakes on a Plane was scary - imagine the sequel! Shampoo on a Plane! Arghhhh!) as an emotional excuse to stay in power. It's all they have left. They are bound to ride it hard.

* In the literal sense too: Invading Iraq has killed a lot more people - none of whom on either side bear any responsibility for the 9/11 attacks - than the attacks did.