The American "9/11" moment and its repercussions

Roy Edroso wrote in his 20th anniversary column on the 9/11 attacks, "God bless you if you have dead to mourn. But I’m done with 9/11. I don’t want to invade any more foreign countries to make some yahoos feel good and some billionaires richer. I just want this country back from the people who manipulated all that violence and heartbreak to make it this way." (The last 9/11:Goodbye to all that Substack 09/10/2021)

Someday, I hope a President will declare September 11 the Barbara Lee Memorial Day. She kept her head more than anyone else in Congress immediately after the attack.

As Michael Moore said yesterday in introducing a special screening of his film Fahrenheit 9/11. "In the end, Bin Laden won." He had a plan that was evil and surely mad. He hoped to pull off a spectacular terrorist attack to which the US would react with domestic repression and foolish military actions against Muslim countries that would generate more of the kind of jihadism he was promoting.

And he did succeed at that.

I'm linking here to a few articles on the need to understand what happened and reorient American policy away from a militarized foreign policy that too easily goes to war for bad reasons and then conducts them badly.

David Bacon, At the End of This Hated War, We Need Truth Foreign Policy in Focus 09/03/2021:

In the days following the attacks on September 11, the United States was called on to declare war against an enemy those in Congress who voted for it couldn’t even name. Policymakers asked American citizens to sacrifice civil liberties for security and give the military money that was so desperately needed to solve the country’s social problems.

Congress did those things with only one dissenting vote: Barbara Lee’s. Now it’s time to look at historical truth, to understand how the United States got this 20-year war, with its ignominious end at the Kabul airport, and how the overarching framework of U.S. policy was responsible for creating it. [my emphasis]

Juan Cole, The Accumulated Evil of the Whole: That time Bush and Co. made the September 11 Attacks a Pretext for War on Iraq Informed Consent 09/11/2021:

The Bush crew desecrated the graves of the September 11 victims by using them pettily as a pretext to have the war that they had long wanted to have. Remembering the victims without remembering the further victims created in their supposed name is hypocrisy.

As the Nuremberg Tribunal said, “To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

In 2003-2008, 4 million Iraqis were displaced and made homeless in a country of 26 million, 1.5 million of them overseas. Something on the order of 200,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the maelstrom unleashed by Bush. This is certainly an under-estimate. We’re still upset about someone killing our 3,000 compatriots on 9/11, and rightly so. Imagine if someone had taken out 200,000 Americans? Given the disparity in population, that Iraqi death toll would equal 1.8 million Americans dead. [my emphasis]

Karen Greenberg, The Endless Shadow of the War on Terror TomDispatch 08/22/2021:

Traditionally, when a war ends, there’s a resolution, perhaps codified in a treaty or an agreement of some sort acknowledging victory or defeat, and a nod to the peace that will follow. Not so with this war.

However unsuccessful, the war on terror, experts tell us, will instead continue. The only difference: it won’t be called a war anymore. Instead, there will be a variety of militarized counterterrorism efforts around the globe. With or without the moniker of “war,” the U.S. remains at war in numerous places, only recently, for instance, launching airstrikes on Somalia to counter the terrorist group al-Shabaab.

In Africa, Syria, and Indonesia, experts warn, the continued spread of ISIS, the reinvigoration of al-Qaeda, and the persistence of groups like Jemaah Islamiyah demand a continued American military counterterrorism effort. All of this was, in a strange way, foreseeable in the drafting of the 2001 AUMF in which no enemy was actually named, nor were temporal or geographical limits or conditions laid down for the resolution of the conflict to come. As the war on terror’s spread to country after country has demonstrated, once unleashed, such a war paradigm takes on a life of its own. [my emphasis]

Fred Kaplan, What We Didn’t Know on 9/11 Slate 08/07/2021:

Donald Trump was hardly the first president to exploit the xenophobic streak in American culture, and 9/11 did not mark the first time a foreign attack sparked rampant fear of foreigners in the United States. (See, for instance, the Japanese internment camps during World War II.) But the spark this time was different; the threat was both more amorphous (a handful of hijackers with box knives) and more real (not even imperial Japan had attacked an American city)—and, as a result, more unnerving. The next attack could come anytime, anywhere, without notice; and the attacker wouldn’t be an army, navy, or air force; it might be that strange-looking man carrying a suspicious-looking object while walking down the street.

In that sense, al-Qaida turned America into a more skittish country; if the goal of terror is to terrorize, the 9/11 attacks were a success. [my emphasis]

Eric Alterman, On 9/11, Was W. AWOL? The American Prospect 09/10/2021: "The attacks of 9/11 have turned out to be the most consequential event in world history since the assassination of President Kennedy. This is due not to the attacks themselves, but to America’s wildly counterproductive overreaction to them." (my emphasis)

Robert Borosage, The War on Terror Is Still Alive and Well The Nation 09/08/2021:

Waging forever wars across the world has had poisonous effects on America, even beyond the cost in lives and money. The executive now asserts the right to dispatch troops and drones across the world, to target assassinations—even against an American citizen—preemptively. Or when, in the words of Obama’s lawyers, “elongated imminence” of a threat can justify the use of force.

Maintaining the forces, weapons, and material of a global “war on terror” as well as contending with what both Trump and Biden now denote as the central threat posed by great-power competition with China and Russia requires an enormous, permanent military-industrial-academic complex. The US military budget now constitutes nearly 40 percent of global military spending, yet Republicans and hawkish Democrats have just announced that that is not enough, pushing to add another $25 billion to the budget this year. [my emphasis]

Just Security also has 9/11 Twentieth Anniversary Symposium featuring several articles on the topic, How Perpetual War Has Changed Us — Reflections on the Anniversary of 9/11. Including a contribution by Luke Hartig, Five Principles to End the Forever War 09/07/2021:

Ultimately, the Biden administration needs to define a new era, one in which militarized responses to irregular threats are a rarity, only conducted after exhausting all other options, and where terrorism is put in proper context alongside other challenges. The goal should be to build a durable framework that greatly constrains the use of force, emphasizes civilian and partner responses, and makes the operations that do take place far smaller and more restrained than those that have predominated across the past two decades. Without clear standards for counterterrorism interventions and effective constraints on the use of force, the United States risks both stumbling into the fray when forbearance would be the wiser course and failing to intervene when action is actually appropriate. Ideally, Congress would be a partner in this goal, stepping up to fulfill its constitutional duty to decide when and where the nation must be at war. But the Biden administration has its own work to do, and despite the difficulty of the Afghanistan withdrawal, it can still diligently pursue a number of steps that could end America’s longest conflict without compromising our security. [my emphasis]