9-11 Nine Years Later: America Finds Itself

photo from Reuters

"It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose agents on us to rule us and then wants us to agree to all this.  If we refuse to do so, it says we are terrorists. When Palestinian children throw stones against the Israeli occupation, the U.S. says they are terrorists.  Whereas when Israel bombed the United Nations building in Lebanon while it was full of children and women, the U.S. stopped any plan to condemn Israel.  At the same time that they condemn any Muslim who calls for his rights, they receive the top official of the Irish Republican Army at the White House as a political leader.  Wherever we look, we find the U.S. as the leader of terrorism and crime in the world." - Osama bin Laden

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9-11 Nine Years Later: The Definition of Insanity

Creating new enemies?This is Part III of a five-part series on the ninth anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 attacks.

Since the attacks of September 11th, 2001 and their effects are the biggest issues of our time, they should not be discussed only briefly on or around that date, but the attacks and their implications should be explored and examined repeatedly until the problems we have created for ourselves are resolved.

It remains unclear whether Benjamin Franklin or Albert Einstein first said, "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."  If this quote is to be taken as truth, then our policy since September 11th, 2001 is insane.  Two principle direct, observable causes of the September 11th attacks were (1) bureaucratic incompetence - a lack of communication between the FBI and the CIA resulted in the terrorists who perpetrated the September 11th attacks falling off the grid and not re-emerging until mid-flight; and (2) aggressive policy in the Middle East - the Middle East is a fairly complicated place.  By playing politics with the Middle East, basically breaking it up into meaningless nation states - meaningless because the Middle East is largely organized along tribal or ethnic lines - we created power vacuums, which usually we tried to micromanage by supporting dictators loyal to us over the Soviets.  This stirred up grassroots hatred and caused otherwise disparate peoples to organize and unite around mutual anti-Americanism (for example, Iran's fervent support for Palestine, al Qaeda in Afghanistan).  It might have turned out differently if, while maintaining a firm grip on political control of the region, we had also encouraged economic and infrastructure development in conjunction with intra-regional competition (our East Asia strategy under MacArthur).  

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9-11 Nine Years Later: Getting Past "Is"

I was seventeen years old when the Twin Towers fell, in the last year of my secondary education.  I was sitting in front of an iMac managing a stock portfolio of 100,000 imaginary dollars.  It was 8:45 in the morning, and my economics class had reserved the computer lab at Corcoran Library of Boston College High School.  I was looking at Yahoo Finance for stock tips, and my partner for the Stock Market Game was reading CNN.com, trying to translate news stories into investments.  

Minutes after the first plane flew into the North Tower, it was on his screen.  It must have been a computer malfunction, we thought, a tragic accident.  The Y2K hysteria was still fresh on our minds, and it was probably this that led everybody (at least every seventeen-year-old in the computer lab) instantly to such a conclusion.  When the second plane crashed into the South Tower about fifteen minutes later, we thought no differently.  The machines were clearly out of control.  There was never a grounding in reality.  There was never a grand realization.  We were all living in a fantasy world created by the mass media; a world which we didn't know would become even more fantastic.  We were the quintessential children of the nineties: breakfast, school, football practice, dinner, homework, AIM, Napster, bed, breakfast, school, football practice, dinner, homework, AIM, Napster, bed... 

I'm twenty-six now, and for the past nine years my generation has largely continued to stand on the sidelines and watch a public conversation which seems incoherent.  From our sheltered, privileged, structured childhoods we were suddenly and viscerally exposed to a destabilizing truth.  We suspect that there may be something fundamentally odd and wrong about what happened on September 11th, 2001; and we suspect that there may be something fundamentally odd and wrong about what has happened since; but the world of the War on Terror and the USAPATRIOT Act is all we really know as adults, so we wonder if it isn't perhaps the way things have always been, or whether it is simply beyond our control.  Hence the existential dread.

During our university years, we were called out by old left culture warriors for being apathetic and indifferent, privileged and selfish; but I prefer to think the information generation is simply collecting information to use when it's our turn to build a better world.  Here is some of that information vis-a-vis September 11th, 2001.

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9-11 Nine Years Later: Introduction

Imaginationland

Lloyd: I'm only human, Harry! Come on! Stop being a baby. So we backtracked a tad!
Harry: A tad? A tad, Lloyd? You drove almost a sixth of the way across the country in the wrong direction! Now we don't have enough money to get to Aspen, we don't have enough money to get home, we don't have enough money to eat, we don't have enough money to sleep!
Lloyd: Well, it's not gonna do us any good sitting here whining about it. We're in a hole. We're just going to have to dig ourselves out.

Saturday marked the 9th anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  

Today, nine years later, we're mired in two intractable and goalless wars, with several more potential goalless wars looming; the size, scope, and power of the government and particularly that government which does not serve the American people in any tangible way has grown out of proportion; individual freedom has objectively declined as more and more Americans acquiesce to a security state central reality; the culture war has had a second, or third, or fourth, or nth renaissance; we now have national debates about whether or not minority groups can be trusted to participate in social and economic life; our economy is in the worst shape it's been since the 1930s and projected to get even worse before it gets better; our military is extended, exposed, and weak, presenting a long-awaited opportunity for regional despot wannabes the world over as well as major players like Russia and China to make whatever power grabs they can; American soft power and cultural prestige has declined across the globe; we have betrayed our historic missions of nonalignment, plurality, heterodoxy, freedom, opportunity, equality, and peace; the average American has been exposed as - or has become - an uninformed, manipulated, fear-driven animal willing to sacrifice the most valuable things in the world in favor of emotional insulation from a cold and distant, imaginary and insignificant threat; our media is complicit as huge news conglomerations try to out-shock each other; even our best politicians prioritize rape-like soundbites over being reelected over getting pork for their constituency over representing the country that they have sworn to serve; and we have put our full civilizational capacity up in a total war against a nebulous, undefinable, undefeatable abstract noun.

This wildly undirected civilizational octopus reaches its tentacles out to grasp even the elements of being a human which have no bearing, no connection, no relation at all to establishing peaceful international relations.  Liberals, conservatives, moderates, radicals, the religious of all stripes, the non-political, non-believers, bankers, teachers, janitors, the unemployed, the old, the young, dead heroes and villains, and the unborn should be outraged, outraged because all of this was preventable, and all of this was the direct, objective result of checking our collective capacity for reason, analysis, dispassionate problem-solving, and justice at the door and entering the deepest nether regions of fear-driven collective tantrums and the darkest id.  

And we still haven't rebuilt the towers or captured bin Laden.