Twelve years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks we're no safer
but more of a police state.
By Donald Kaul
The 9/11 attacks
comprise one of those events that you remember where you heard of it and how,
like the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was for old-timers and JFK’s
assassination was for middle-timers.
I had recently
retired (for the first time) and was sitting at an outdoor café in
Bethesda, Maryland. A stranger came up and said: “A plane has just crashed into
the World Trade Center in New York.”
I immediately thought
of that time decades before when a plane had plowed into an upper floor of the
Empire State Building in a fog. This had to be some version of that.
“What a terrible
thing,” I said.
I have a gift for
understatement. As the morning wore on the bad news mounted. Another plane hit
the Trade Center. Thousands dead. The Pentagon itself hit. There were reports
of a fourth hijacked plane, possibly on its way to Washington, that crashed in
Pennsylvania.
At the end of the day,
although we didn’t realize it at the time, we had become a different nation —
one less confident and more fearful than the one we’d been on September 10,
2001.
It was, as much as we
hate to admit it, one of the greatest, most effective sneak attacks in the
history of modern warfare. A handful of Islamic extremists armed with box
cutters — box cutters! — in one swift strike had reduced to rubble the reigning
symbol of American capitalism, set ablaze the headquarters of our military
establishment, and come oh so close to putting a flying bomb into our nation’s
political heart.
Our days as a fat,
dumb, complacent democracy were over.
Within months we’d
gone to war in retaliation for the attack, even though the ghostly nature of
our attackers made a coherent war — one in which you were absolutely sure who
your enemy was — impossible. That was followed by another war, that one
absolutely incomprehensible to many of us.
In the meantime we
subjected ourselves to an ever-increasing level of surveillance redolent of
East Germany and a surrender of privacy more Orwellian than Jeffersonian. We
became aware that modern warfare now includes the torture of prisoners and that
the murder of civilians was part of its “collateral damage.”
And while there were
protests, we as a nation accepted all of it. Which is where we sit right now,
12 years on, no safer than we were but more of a police state.
I had been very much
against the presidency of George W. Bush. He was the wrong man in the wrong
place at the wrong time. I was happy when, at long last, the public picked
Barack Obama, a much smarter fellow, to replace him.
Obama, alas, has been
a disappointment. Rather than reverse the bellicose foreign policies of
Bush-Cheney he has adopted a course I call “Bush Lite.”
He’s a master of the
half-measure. He repudiates wars but lets them go on a while because they are
difficult to unwind. He tries to help friendly forces in the Middle East in
their battles with oppressive regimes but not too much because, after all, who
knows how friendly they really are?
Most of all, he
refuses to make his case. Take his health care plan, for example. You have
heard 100 times more from the Republicans about what a bad idea it is than you
have from Obama about its virtues. Most of what the Republicans are saying
about it is nonsense but he doesn’t take the trouble to point that out.
So now he finds
himself out on a limb, virtually alone, trying to sell his plan to punish
Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad for using poison gas — except that I don’t
know what the plan is. So far as I know, no one does.
He’s reduced to
reaching for a rescuing hand from that loathsome slug, Vladimir Putin. Such is
the legacy of 9/11.
OtherWords columnist
Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. OtherWords.org
