Reflections on the
American Response to 9-11
On September 11, 2001, nineteen men
belonging to the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda carried out by far the
largest, most destructive terrorist attack on the United States yet. I won’t go
into all the gory details here. We all know them well enough. I remember waking
my wife that morning as I was leaving for work (which I had hoped would be
canceled for that day but wasn’t) and telling her about the attack saying,
“It’s a terrorist Pearl Harbor out there.” We also know how our country
responded to the attack. At first there was a great sense of unity and a swell
of patriotism among the American people. Our longer term response consisted of
three measures of immense importance to our country and to the world. They
were, in chronological order, the US invasion of Afghanistan, the passage of
the so-called Patriot Act, and the US invasion of Iraq. Each of those responses
is highly problematic in its own way. So is the phrase I hear over and over
again about 9-11, “Never forget.” It is the problematic nature of all four of
these responses that I want to discuss here.
Before I get into those responses I
want to examine the statement I made to my (late) wife that we were experiencing
a terrorist Pearl Harbor. The 9-11 attack was similar to the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, in at least a couple of particular ways. Both
9-11 and Pearl Harbor were violent attacks on the United States that caused three
thousand deaths. Both were attacks by people who considered the United States
their enemy. Yet those attacks are significantly different too. The Japanese
attack on the US navy base at Pearl Harbor was carried out by a sovereign
nation. We knew who did it while they were doing it. The Japanese intended the
attack as a means of destroying or at least severely impairing the US Navy’s
Pacific fleet. They hoped to eliminate a threat to their brutal, imperialist
conquest of much of eastern and southeastern Asia. They very nearly succeeded.
The main reason they didn’t succeed at it entirely was that the navy’s aircraft
carriers were out at sea at the time. The Japanese also underestimated the
determination of the American government and people to defeat the country that
had carried out the dastardly attack. They also underestimated America’s ability
to restore the fleet and our industrial capacity to turn out the weapons of
war.
The 9-11 attack was carried out not
by a sovereign nation but by a private terrorist group that was far more
nebulous than is a sovereign country. The terrorists intended the attack to
have symbolic significance more than they intended to cripple the US’s ability
to fight back. They attacked symbolic targets—The World Trade Center as a
symbol of America’s economic strength, the Pentagon as a symbol of America’s
military strength, and either the White House or the Capitol building as a
symbol of America’s political strength. The only reason we don’t know which of
those buildings the terrorists intended to strike is because the heroic efforts
of the passengers on board one of the airplanes the terrorists hijacked
overcame the hijackers and crashed the plane into the ground in Pennsylvania,
thereby preventing the terrorists who had hijacked that plane from carrying out
their deadly mission. I’ve heard it said that US intelligence officers knew at
once that it was al-Qaeda that had carried out the attack, but the rest of us
didn’t. Al-Qaeda wasn’t an institution with a fixed, known location the way a
sovereign nation is. The nongovernmental, nebulous structure of al-Qaeda made
attacking it in response to what it had done significantly more difficult than
was responding militarily to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
The Invasion of Afghanistan
However 9-11 may compare to the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the first major US response to the 9-11 was to
invade Afghanistan, which we did early in October, 2001. Afghanistan is a
predominantly Muslim country just to the east or Iran and just to the west of
Pakistan. The demographics of Afghanistan are almost hopelessly complex, with
the population consisting of different tribes to whom people tend to pay
allegiance more than they do to the nominal national government in Kabul, the
country’s capital city. When the US invaded, an Islamist organization called
the Taliban controlled most of the country. The Taliban was formed only in
1994, but other Islamist groups had existed in the country for a long time
before the American invasion. In late 1979 the Soviet Union, Afghanistan’s
neighbor to the north at the time, invaded the country in support of a friendly
government in Kabul that was fighting a civil war against various groups most
if not all of which were radically Islamist. Because the rebels were fighting
the Soviet Union, the United States’ cold war opponent at that time, the US
supplied them with arms and other kinds of support. The rebels essentially
fought the Soviets to a standstill, and in early 1989 the Soviets withdrew
their armed forces from the country. That the Soviet Union, with a land border
with Afghanistan, couldn’t subdue the country’s Islamist groups should have
been a warning to us. The decision makers in Washington, DC, missed it. Either
they were ignorant of the history of Afghanistan, or they knew it but ignored
it. Both of those possible truths are, frankly, simply inexcusable.
By 2001 the Taliban, a group from a
fundamentalist Islamist tradition that originated in India in the 19th
century but which since the late 1970s had been influenced by the strict,
reactionary Wahhabist Islam of Saudi Arabia and had received significant
financial support from that country, controlled most of Afghanistan. The
Taliban did not carry out the 9-11 attacks A fundamentalist terrorist
organization called al-Qaeda did that. Most of the 9-11 terrorists, including
their leader Osama bin Landen, were Saudis not Afghanis. Al-Qaeda was however
ensconced in Afghanistan with the support of the Taliban.
US intelligence agencies believed
that bin Laden, the mastermind behind the 9-11 attack, was himself in
Afghanistan. So the Americans’ stated purpose in invading Afghanistan was to
take out bin Laden and destroy al-Qaeda. We failed to achieve either objective.
Al-Qaeda still exists, and US special forces killed bin Laden only years later
and in Pakistan not Afghanistan. We did however remove the Taliban from power in
Kabul. That government, like the one the Soviets had invaded to support years
earlies, was fighting a number of Islamist groups for control of the country,
the Taliban chief among them. President Biden recently withdrew American armed
forces from the country. The Taliban quickly took over most of the country. If
we had never invaded Afghanistan, or if we had withdrawn our forces as soon as
it was apparent that we were not going to catch bin Laden there, we would have
left the country in the control of the Taliban. Now as did withdraw our forces
we have left the country in the control of the Taliban. In other words, the
loss of American lives and the expenditure of an immense amount of American
money accomplished exactly nothing.
The United States should never have
invaded Afghanistan. There are at least three reasons why that is true. First,
there was no way we could ever control that country. Some call Afghanistan “the
graveyard of empires.” The British never controlled it though they made what is
now Pakistan immediately to the east of Afghanistan part of their colony of
India. The Russian Empire never controlled it. The tsars expanded their reach in
central Asia as far as Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, but they never even tried
to incorporate Afghanistan into their empire. The Soviet Union couldn’t control
the country There was never any possibility that we could control it. The
complex demographics and geography of the country make it essentially
ungovernable by any outside force. That we would never control Afghanistan, and
that therefore we would never catch bin Laden or destroy al-Qaeda there, should
have been obvious to American decisionmakers. It wasn’t. Those decisionmakers
did not see what was there plainly to be seen.
The second reason we should never
have invaded Afghanistan is something we should have learned nearly thirty
years before September 11, 2001. It is the lesson we should have learned from
the disaster of the war in Vietnam. We should have learned that we cannot
establish and maintain a government of which we approve anywhere in the world
by military force alone against the determined resistance of a highly
motivated, tightly organized, heavily armed movement that is popular with a
substantial portion of the country’s population. That’s what we tried to do in
Vietnam, and we failed spectacularly. Setting up a government we liked in Kabul
wasn’t our original intention when we invaded Afghanistan. It was however what
we ended up trying to do there. There was never any possibility of our doing
it. The improbability or even impossibility of success should have been obvious
to America’s political and military leaders. It wasn’t, and because it wasn’t
we ended up with twenty years of war that accomplished nothing.
There is yet another reason why we never
should have responded to the 9-11 attack with military force. We see how this
is true when we look at the international dynamic that produced Islamist terrorism
in the first place. Islamist terrorists are not terrorists because Islam is
terrorist. It isn’t, and groups like al-Qaeda violate some it that faith’s core
teachings every time they kill innocent civilians. Rather, Islamist terrorism
arose in a historical setting in which we are far from innocent. Empires have
occupied and ruled the Muslim peoples of North Africa and the Middle East for
well over one thousand years. The first of those empires, the Arab sultanate,
was at least indigenous to that part of the world. The others, including the
Turks, the British, and French, were not. Today’s borders of the countries in
that part of the world were drawn by western imperial powers with little regard
for the ethnic and religious diversity of those countries. After World War II
the western powers created the state of Israel. Whatever you may think of
Israel, it cannot be denied that it was created on land that had been Arab for
centuries. It exists on land that had been taken from Arab owners, who then
became displaced. Huge numbers of those Arabs and their descendants still live
in refugee camps located mostly in Jordan. For a very long time western powers
governed the Muslim world from Morocco to Indonesia in their own interests not
in the interests of the mostly Muslim populations over which they ruled. It is
said that in the Middle East people think the crusades happened yesterday. To
them their rule by foreigners must seem like it happened in the last ten
minutes. The rise of Islamist terrorism is of course deplorable, but it is far
from incomprehensible when we know the history of that part of the world.
Islamist terror was directed
against the US in part because of the presence of US military bases in the
Middle East, especially in Saudi Arabia. US military action in the Muslim
countries of that part of the world, including our invasion of Afghanistan,
have only heightened the animosity of a great many Muslim people against the
US. It is practically a truism that for every Islamist terrorist we kill we
produce ten more. That dynamic should have been obvious to the US decision
makers in October, 2001. It wasn’t, and because it wasn’t and because of our
country’s righteous anger against the 9-11 terrorists we made the fateful
mistake of invading Afghanistan.
It should be clear that the US
never should have invaded Afghanistan. That conclusion is obvious in hindsight,
but it should have been obvious when our leaders decided to invade that country
back in 2001. There was never any chance that we could control the country or
establish a stable government in Kabul with sufficient popular support to make
it viable. Military action against ideological zealots like al-Qaeda and the
Taliban provoke more opposition than they eliminate. We could have responded to
the 9-11 attack with traditional law enforcement actions that could have result
in bin Laden and others involved the carrying out that attack being taken into custody
and tried for their crimes. We didn’t do that. We sent in the Marines. The
losses we incurred and our failure to accomplish anything constructive were the
inevitable result.
The Patriot Act
The second significant American
response to the 9-11 attack was the enactment of something called the Uniting
and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept
and Obstruct Terrorism. Quite obviously Congress gave the act that long and
cumbersome name because it acronym of USPARTIOT, so we know the Act as the
Patriot Act. The Act consists of ten “Titles,” but the essence of the law is
that it:
·
Expanded the surveillance abilities of law
enforcement including among other things an expanded authorization for the
authorities to tap both domestic and international telephones.
·
Authorized the search of property and records
without a warrant or the knowledge of the subject person.
·
Eased interagency communications to allow
federal agencies more effectively to use all available resources in counterterrorism
efforts.
·
Increased penalties for terrorism crimes and
expanded the list of activities that would qualify for terrorism charges.
·
Authorized the detention of terrorist suspects
without formal charges or a conviction.
·
Made changes to an older law that had
established something called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
(FISA), which handles applications submitted by the US government for approval
of electronic surveillance, physical search, and other investigative actions
for foreign intelligence purposes.
Civil rights groups have alleged that the FISA court
authorizes requested action without requiring the government to show probably
cause as is required by the Fourth Amendment. Courts have ruled several
provisions of the Act unconstitutional. The Act had several sunset provisions
but was modified and extended to as recently as 2019.
Congress should never have passed,
and the president should never have signed, the Patriot Act. There’s a famous
story that has it that at the close of the Constitutional Convention that
drafted what became the Constitution of the United States someone asked
Benjamin Franklin what the convention had created. He is reputed to have
replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Republics may be at best the best of
a bad lot of governmental forms, but republics are difficult to keep. Republics
that guarantee certain civil rights to their people are harder to keep, or at
least those guarantees of civil rights are harder to keep. Franklin knew that
the representational, republican form of government that the convention had
just created was fragile. It was fragile even though as originally drafted the Constitution
did not contain the first ten amendments that we know as the Bill of Rights. The
Constitution was drafted in 1789. The Bill of Rights wasn’t adopted until 1791.
As Franklin knew, keeping the new republic was doubtful without those rights of
the people. Adding those rights to the Constitution made it even harder to
keep.
The civil rights of the people
contained in the Bill of Rights are difficult to keep for at least a couple of
reasons. The rights the Bill of Rights guarantees are rights of the people
against the government. They are limitations of the power of government. They
create a delicate balance of power between the people and the state. Some of
the country’s people prefer that the state have more power, others prefer that
is have less. The courts have created a huge and complex body of case law that
deals with that balance of power and the conflicting views on where the
balancing point should be. The case law establishes that no constitutional
right is absolute. The cases that make up that body of law deal with which way
the balance should tip in each case. Most Americans seem not to understand just
what the Bill of Rights is and how it functions and does not function. There is
always the danger that uninformed public opinion will force the government,
including the courts, to tip the balance too far to one side or the other. The
courts could tip the balance so far to the side of the government that the
rights the Constitution supposedly guarantees become meaningless. Many
advocates of civil rights believe that the Patriot Act tips the balance too far
to the side of the government.
The second reason why our republic
and the Bill of Rights are at risk is that the Bill of Rights is there to do
something most Americans don’t understand and tend to oppose once they do
understand it. The civil rights in the Constitution are there precisely to
protect the rights of people who are unpopular or who hold and express
unpopular ideas. As a practical matter no guarantee of rights is necessary to protect
people with whom the public for the most part agrees. The problems arise when
someone holds and expresses ideas with which most people disagree. The easiest
examples of this truth relate to the First Amendment’s guarantee of free
speech. Some people hold and express ideas that most Americans find to be
anathema. The “red scare” of the early 1950s is a good example. Some Americans
advocated a socialist form of government and the economy. Some had belonged to
the Communist Party, and some continued to belong to it. Most Americans
strongly rejected socialist or Communist views on essentially every issue. When
I was a child in the 1950s I heard a lot about “godless Communism” Most of what
I heard was badly misinformed, but the point is that that’s how most Americans
thought about Communism. The demagogue senator Joe McCarthy tried to use the antipathy most Americans had
toward Communism to deprive people who believed in Communism of their
constitutional right to express their views. Under the First Amendment the
government has no right to do any such thing. Yet in the 1950s surely most
Americans would have found the assertion that the government had so right to
silence the expression of such unpopular views to be perfectly absurd. That’s
why the guarantee of rights in the Bill of Rights is necessary. We need it to
prevent the government, swayed by public opinion, from silencing the expression
of unpopular beliefs. No one has to protect anyone’s right to say I love my
country. For civil rights to mean anything however the state must protect
everyone’s right to say that they don’t.
There simply is no doubt that some
provisions of the Patriot Ace violated some of the rights guaranteed to the
people in the Bill of Rights. It seems undeniable that the Act’s revision of
the FISA stature was meant to and did in fact violate the Fourth Amendment.
That Amendment reads:
The right of the people to be secure in
their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and
seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable
cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place
to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The federal courts have held that this guarantee against
unreasonable searches and seizures, and the Amendment’s requirement for the
issuance of a warrant on probable cause support by sworn statements is so
important that a court will prohibit the introduction of any evidence the state
has obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Miranda v. Arizona,
384 U.S. 436 (1966).
The FISA stature required that the
FISA court act only ex parte, that is, with only onside of a dispute,
the government, present at any court proceedings. The FISA courts operates in
secret. Advocates of the Patriot Act assert that secrecy is necessary to
prevent the disclosure of confidential national security information. That may
be true, but the court’s secrecy makes it impossible for a person against whom
a warrant is issued to challenge the warrant by establishing that it was issued
in violation of the Fourth Amendment. If the material submitted in support of
the application for a warrant is kept secret even in any subsequent criminal
proceedings the defendant is deprived of an important constitutional right, the
right to challenge the validity of any warrant issued against them. In this
respect and probably in others many provisions of the Patriot Act are
unconstitutional in their wording, their intent, and their execution.
One of the greatest threats to
democracy and civil rights is the willingness of the people of a country to
give up their democracy and their civil rights when they are frightened or made
angry by some real or imagined threat to their security. That’s a major reason
why democracy and guarantees of civil rights can be so hard to maintain. In
1933 Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, the top position in the
government, under the constitution of the Weimar Republic that had been
established after World War I. It was clear when the head of state, President
Paul von Hindenburg, made Hitler chancellor that Hitler was a totalitarian and
no friend of democracy and civil rights at all. But the people were afraid.
They were afraid of the threat (as most of them saw it) of Communism on the Soviet
model taking over their country. They were afraid of what the future might hold
for them because of the widespread economic uncertainty of the time. They were
angry about the grossly unfair terms of the Treaty of Versailles that the
victorious allies imposed on Germany after World War I. So they accepted Adolf
Hitler as chancellor and supported him as he dismantled the democracy of the
Weimar Republic and imposed a reign of oppression and terror on their nation.
In the 1930s most German people willingly gave up their democracy and their
rights because of their fear and anger.
In the wake of the 9-11 terrorist
attack on the United States most Americans were afraid of the threat of future
terrorist attacks. I do not mean to suggest that they had no reason to be
afraid. They did. The problem is that they therefore let their elected
representatives pass and enforce a law that on its face violates their rights
under the Fourth Amendment (and possibly other Amendments as well). Most
Americans, it seems, were quite willing to give up those rights in exchange for
what they saw as increased security. That the people will freely give up their
rights when they are afraid or angry is the greatest threat to democracy and
freedom. Our country gave in to that threat when it enacted the Patriot Act. As
Franklin is supposed to have said, we have a republic if we can keep it. We
have a democracy and civil rights only if we can keep them. The Patriot Act was
a step in the direction of not keeping them. We were attacked by people with no
commitment to democracy and civil rights at all. To some extend we did to
ourselves what Osama bin Laden could never do to us. We compromised the values
we claim to uphold. That we did makes the passage of the Patriot Act an
inappropriate and harmful response to the 9-11 terrorist attack.
The Invasion of Iraq
On March 19, 2003, two and a half
years after 9-11, The United States launched an air assault on the country of
Iraq. The next day we sent in the army to conduct a ground war against the
government of that country. It took about one month for the American and allied
forces to occupy Baghdad, the country’s capital city, and remove the government
of the dictator Saddam Hussein from power. We established a provisional
governing authority run by Americans. That authority made the colossal mistake
of removing members of Hussein’s Baath Party from their jobs whatever those
jobs were, thereby removing nearly everyone who had actual knowledge of how to
run a country and its infrastructure. Of course chaos ensued. That authority
also disbanded the Iraqi army, thereby creating a large number of trained,
armed soldiers with no allegiance to that authority at all. Other disastrous
consequences of our invasion of Iraq, including the creation of ISIS, are well
known. It is perhaps less clear that the invasion of Iraq was a response to
9-11 than it is with the other two responses we have considered. Nonetheless I
believe that we never would have invaded Iraq had 9-11 never happened. Here's
how I reach that conclusion.
Some background information is
necessary here. The 2003 invasion was America’s second major military operation
against Iraq. On August 2, 1990, Iraqi armed forces invaded and occupied the
small but oil rich neighboring nation of Kuwait. The United States, together
with many allies, went to war to force them out of that country. President
George H. W. Bush ended the war once Iraq was out of Kuwait though some were
pressuring him to send the army all the way to Baghdad to remove Saddam
Hussein, the country’s dictator, from power.
Already by 1990 it was apparent
that Saddam Hussein was a very bad actor. He had established a regime in Iraq
modeled on Stalinist Russia. Like Stalin had done with the Communist Party,
Hussein governed his country through one political party, in this case the
Baath Party. In Soviet Russia a great many people joined the Communist Party
not because they were convinced Communists but because belonging to the party
was usually necessary for a person to advance in their career or to gain other
perks. In Saddam’s Iraq the same was true for the Baath Party. Baath Party
members were the Iraqis who knew how to do things like run a system of public
transportation or operate a municipal water and sewer system. It seems doubtful
that American decision makers truly understood what Saddam’s Baath Party was
and what it meant for the normal operation of public functions in Iraq.
As is true of so many countries in
Iraq’s part of the world, the demographics of Iraq are quite complex. A
majority of the population is Shi’ite Muslim. A significant minority of the
population is Sunni Muslim. Saddam Hussein headed a Sunni administration ruling
over a majority Shi’ite population. There is also a substantial population of
Kurds, mostly in the north of the country. The Kurds are predominately Sunni
Muslims, but they are not Arabs as the majority of the country is. They are
linguistically related to the Iranians. They live is several different
countries in the region, mostly in northwest Iran, northern Iraq, northeastern
Syria, and southeastern Turkey. They are reputed to be the largest ethnic group
in the world that does not have its own country. The Saddam Hussein regime
treated them brutally, at least once attacking them with nerve gas. Saddam also
oppressed the majority Shi’ite Arab population by putting only Sunni Arabs in
positions of power.
Defending the Iraqi Kurds and Sunni
Arabs was not however the US’s stated purpose in invading Iraq in 2003. The
stated purpose was to stop the Hussein regime from acquiring weapons of mass
destruction and to dispose of any he may have had, weapons such a nerve gas and
other toxins. Apparently US intelligence agencies had some slight, not very
definitive information that said that Saddam had such weapons. It is also
apparent, however, that the George W. Bush administration grossly overplayed
what that slight evidence might suggest was an appropriate American response.
It seem to be virtually certain that George W. Bush wanted to do what his
father had not done in 1990, namely, to invade Iraq and get rid of Saddam
Hussein and his regime. Just why W. Bush wanted to do that so badly is not
entirely clear. It seems, however, that Saddam had made some sort of threat
against Bush’s father, former president George H. W. Bush. It also appears to
be true that W. Bush wanted to be a wartime president. Americans never support
their president as much as they do when the country is at war. Most Americans
think a couple of wartime presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt,
are our greatest presidents perhaps exceeded in public esteem only by George
Washington, another wartime leader.. Be that as it may, it is undeniable that
W. Bush and his administration latched onto the shaky intelligence about Saddam
having weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for going to war against that
country. Of course, it turned out that Saddam had no weapons of mass
destruction, something the Bush administration should have figured out before
starting a war over such weapons.
There is another undeniable fact
about the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was illegal. It was an illegal war of
aggression against a nation that, evil as its ruler was, posed no threat at all
to the United States. George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick
Chaney, and others who took the US to war against Iraq and who offered the
flimsiest of excuses for doing so are war criminals under international law.
Our invasion of Iraq was unprovoked and had no relationship to American
national security other than a negative one. It made us less safe because of
the reaction it provoked among the Sunni Arabs we removed from power in that
complex country of which our leaders seem to have had no understanding at all.
In much of the analysis of the 2003
invasion of Iraq analysts seem to assume that the invasion would have been
legal and justified if Saddam Hussein had actually had weapons of mass
destruction. Is that assumption justified? I don’t think so. What threat would
any WMDs Hussein had have posed to the United States? Essentially none. Hussein
had no practical method of deploying those hypothetical weapons against the US
and no reason to deploy them even if he had had the means to do it. Iraqi WMDs
may have posed a threat to Israel, but Israel has proven several times over
that it is more than capable of looking out after its own national security.
Such weapons would have posed a threat to the Kurds, against whom Saddam had
used them before, but what principle of international law makes us the
defenders of the Kurds? None whatsoever. All of W Bush’s talk about weapons of mass
destruction justifying our invasion of Iraq was nothing but a ruse designed to
get the American people to support an illegal war that Bush and his neocon
advisors just wanted to wage.
So the US invasion of Iraq in 2003
was an illegal war of aggression, but how was it a response to 9-11? Its
connection to 9-11 lies in the way 9-11 heightened American awareness of the
threat of Islamist terrorism. Not without justification the American people
were much more frightened by Islamist terrorist groups like al-Qaeda after 9-11
than they had been before 9-11. It is safe to assume that American intelligence
agencies were much more vigilant in protecting the US against such terrorism
after 9-11 than they had been before 9-11. The Bush administration played on the
American people’s fear of terrorism by claiming that Saddam Hussein might give
weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups. In making that claim the
administration ignored two certain facts. First, there has never been any
evidence that the Saddam regime had any friendly relationship with al-Qaeda or
any other Islamist terrorist group. Second, it is undeniable that while Saddam
had used a weapon of mass destruction against some of his own people, the Iraqi
Kurds. He had never used them against anyone else except perhaps Iran in the
long war between those two countries. It was only the fear of terrorist attack
that 9-11 produced among the American people that made it possible for George
W. Bush to cry “terrorism!” and get the American people to support his illegal
war of aggression in Iraq. That is how our 2003 invasion of Iraq is a response
to the 9-11 attack.
Conclusion: Never Forget
We just passed the 20th
anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attack on our country. That anniversary is
hardly a cause for celebration. It is rather a time of remembrance of the over
three thousand people who died in that attack and especially of the courageous
first responders, especially those of the New York Fire Department who acted so
bravely and so many of whom lost their lives that day. I want nothing I say
here in any way to reflect any lack of recognition of the horrible things that
happened that day or to show any disrespect of those who suffered and died in
that attack that at the time I called a terrorist Pearl Harbor. I do want to
reflect here on the meaning of a phrase
that I heard over and over again as we marked that doleful anniversary. That
phrase is, “Never forget.” It is both perfectly appropriate and potentially
dangerous. Let me explain.
Events like 9-11 leave a long-term
if not permanent scar on a nation’s psyche. They are things we cannot simply
forget. In a couple of months we will mark the eightieth anniversary of the
Japanese attack on the American military installations at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
Very few people who were alive then are alive now, but still we remember
December 7 as a day that, as President Roosevelt said at the time, will live in
infamy. I expect that in 2081, eighty years after 9/11/01 Americans will still
mark that date as another date that will live in infamy as indeed they should.
That being said and sincerely meant, I must also say that there is a distinct
danger that we will remember things we really should forget or that at least we
should never repeat. My whole argument in this essay is that our responses to
the 9-11 attack were all wrong. We responded to a law enforcement issue with
military force. We responded to an attack by people who do not value or respect
freedom and civil rights by passing a national law that restricted our freedom
and some of our civil rights. There is a great deal we could learn from the
9-11 attack. There is a great deal we could learn from our misguided responses
to it. If all we do is not forget we will very probably miss those lessons. So
yes, never forget; but let us remember rightly. Let us not allow our
remembering to become only a reinforcement of the mistakes we made. If we can
do that perhaps all of the losses we sustained on that terrible day will not
have been entirely in vain.
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