The awful truth is: what 9/11 revealed, and what it was designed to reveal, is that there is nothing we can really do definitively to stop another one. They had no weapons but our own technology. The training they had was not that sophisticated and the costs of the operation were relatively tiny. There were 19 of them. None of the key perpetrators has been brought to justice. Bin Laden remains at large. If you calculate the costs of that evil attack against the financial, moral and human costs of the fight back, 9/11 was a fantastic demonstration of the power of asymmetry to destroy the West.
Everything that has subsequently transpired has merely deepened that lesson. The US is now bankrupt, trapped in Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of our lives, unable even to prevent the two most potentially dangerous Islamist states, Pakistan and Iran, from getting nukes, morally compromised and hanging on to global support only because of a new president who is even now being assaulted viciously at home for such grievous crimes as trying to get more people access to health insurance.
Yes, security is much better. Yes, it's amazing that more attacks have not taken place. Yes, Muslim-Americans have not joined Jihad the way many Europeans have. Yes, we have gained some small benefits from ousting the Taliban, and Saddam ... although at terrible costs. But we have done nothing to show that we can really win this war by the methods we have used so far. The biggest blow to al Qaeda as a global brand has not been what we have done to them, but what they have done to themselves, by their flagrant violence against fellow Muslims, their nihilism, and their barbaric brutality.
And now, in the wake of Fort Hood, we face the possibility of radicalizing Muslims in America and polarizing more Americans against them. This does not help.
I've obviously talked quite a bit this week about Fort Hood. I think there are two things at work in our foreign policy, both of the traceable to the citizenry. 1.) A consistent overestimation of American might. The notion that American "can do anything," and what it fails to do is a reflection of its leadership, not its people. 2.) And related to that, the human inclination toto search for solutions in the wake of tragedy, to find that one thing that we could have been done differently. This is useful, I guess, but only up to a point.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Those two things are clearly the Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together. The lesson of Gulf War I, which was spectacularly successful, is that the thing we should differently is be humble about how much we can do. Bush I methodically amassed a huge coalition to apply overwhelming force to a problem defined in restrictive terms. Strong work of the kind we tossed to the wind this past decade
The other thing 9/11 revealed is that there is an undercurrent of strident, often violent, jingoism and racism in this country that can be unleashed with just the right provocation. We as a country went ape-shit on 9/11 and too many of us haven't recovered.
"in this country" in particular? "with just the right provocation" people in any country will be set off. Sudden, devastating violence tends to be upsetting, wouldn't you say?
Yeah. On the real side, we didn't go nearly as apeshit as I expected.
very few countries have the means to set off on possibly more than a decade long wars thousands of miles away from their borders with a 700 billion dollar a year taxpayer funded behemoth to do the dirty work
I'd add to your pair of lessons a third - perhaps the most powerful of all.
America is strong. Far, far stronger than we generally believe. If we have the faith and constancy to endure, rival ideologies will eventually spend themselves. We are a nation that derives its authority from the consent of the governed - of, by and for the people. Over the past century, the greatest threats to our national well-being have come from movements in which a small and impassioned minority insists on ruling in the name of the people, and in their interest. These movements claim to be for the people, but their regimes are not of the people. Even when they obtain the support of the majority, they rely upon the violent suppression of dissenting minorities. Over the long term, such regimes pay a terrible price - not only in the blood they shed, but in the stifling of innovation, the abandonment of free inquiry.
We'll win this struggle by holding fast to our ideals, by taking reasonable and prudent measures to bolster our security, by engaging our enemies opportunistically and selectively, and by supporting those around the world who likewise seek peace and freedom.
America's unconquerable optimism is an asset, as well as a liability; its focus on solutions works for good, as well as ill. Similarly, the same ideals that will eventually help us prevail can also, in some circumstances, make us more vulnerable. It's a package deal. What I cannot abide are those who, wrapping themselves in the mantle of patriotism, would have us jettison all that makes America distinctive and worthwhile in the name of exigent circumstance. I cannot understand their lack of confidence, their unstated contempt for our system. They see us as weak for the very reasons that we are strong.
I think Andrew's point is well worth pondering. We held the Soviet Union at bay for long enough that it eventually collapsed under its own weight. The regimes in Iran and Pakistan are tottering, and the Arab world's autocracies are restive. When Al-Qaeda gained the chance to govern in Iraq, it did what we could not - it finally turned the Iraqi people against its virulent ideology. Similarly, Hamas enjoys less support today in Gaza than before it assumed control. Which is not to say that better regimes are in the offing; but it is worth noting that bad regimes tend to come with an expiration date, even absent our intervention.
Reviewing the last hundred years of our history, some clear lessons emerge. Containing a movement through repression rarely succeeds in the long run; the succession of strong men we've supported around the world to fend off popular groups with reprehensible agendas have almost always given way in the end. But when odious regimes finally do come to power, they almost always spend themselves, often fairly rapidly - either falling themselves, or evolving into less objectionable form (as, for example, China). If we can contain them within their borders, we can wait them out. When we fail to contain them - as in the cases of, for example, Germany, Japan and Korea - it is necessary to turn to violent confrontation to stem their expansion. The people of these nations pay a terrible price in the interim, and we should certainly do all we can to hasten the day that change will come. But the costs of direct intervention too often outweigh its benefits, to us or to the people we aim to help.
You seriously think we've brought peace and freedom to Iraq and Afghanistan?
I don't see why you'd assume that clause referred to Iraq and Afghanistan. The whole point of the post is that we're generally better off supporting regimes whose values we share than invading those that don't. It makes sense to contain such regimes - throwing Saddam back out of Kuwait was a good move - but generally speaking, not to overthrow them. If one believes that open, democratic, and tolerant societies are both the most moral and the most effective, then time is on our side.
But to answer the specific question, we've brought freedom - and with it, destroyed the peace.
Cynic, your points recall George Kennan's basic argument: Containment will work, as long as we are able to contain ourselves.
I do think that you have to hold leadership accountable for being afraid of the political fallout that comes from telling the American people that we can't do everything. Don't you think, for example, that this fear is a big part of the reason why Obama can't just say it's time to get out of Afghanistan? He'd be right to say it's a problem that we just can't fix, but the fallout would be that he's disrespecting the soldiers, etc.
Is is a problem we just can't fix, or a problem that's not worth the cost of fixing?
From the conservative's viewpoint, there are problems that cannot necessarily be fixed, or at least cannot be fixed without spawning unintended consequences.
Unfortunately, few 'Conservatives' had the integrity to remember this insight.
The question may not be whether we can 'fix' the problem, but whether we can 'fix it and forget it.' I'm willing to believe that there are many problems that truly cannot be permanently fixed, only 'maintained' and remediated. Most of these 'problems' are likely best left to be solved by people with a more direct interest.
One minor nit with this article: Osama almost certainly died at Tora Bora.
For him to escape, he would have needed to elude the special forces and Afghan army surrounding Tora Bora. A 6'5" Arab is nearly as conspicuous in Afghanistan as he is here; he didn't just walk past the Afghani Army. Even more conspicuous: a 6'5" Arab carrying a portable kidney dialysis machine. If he escaped without the dialysis machine, he still would have died unless he somehow made it to a dialysis center in Waziristan.
Note that he hasn't released an unambiguous video since Tora Bora (i.e., in his "message asking the American people to vote for Bush's opponent"), and he didn't mention Kerry by name. He also appears to have not aged in any video since Tora Bora.
He got blown up or buried at Tora Bora. We just never found the body.
Uhh....
uh yeah, maybe it goes without saying but in response to such insights it always pays to consider the source...
This is one of those conspiracy theories my boyfriend believes in.
Bin was allowed to escape.
We had few special forces at tora bora.
The so-called afghani army, local tribesman, looked the other way.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
We know that the cia visited bin in a hospital in dubai in summer of '01. He had kidney issues. see Le Figaro
Bin was in the employ of the cia at least until 9/11. see sibel edwards.
60 Minutes had an interesting segment with one of the heads of our special forces at Tora Bora. He essentially said the same thing as far as Osama escaping while the local tribesman, who were paid by the Americans to help fight Osama's men, played dummy and looked the other why while they escaped.
However, mtlasagna, this does not mean you are not a complete nutcase. It just means that Ninja Zombie is wrong.
I know someone who was SF at Tora Bora at that time. DoD called them back. He was allowed to escape.
Is he alive now? I don't know.
Someone convincing has been doing a lot of videos in the interim then
only if you're easily fooled.
He was talking to Ninja Zombie. Someone who you disagreed with as well. You don't even know what conspiracies you believe at this point.
Sorry for responding.
Whatever damage 9/11 did, 8 years of Bush was able to things worse. I wish we as a nation were able to focus more on how badly Bush fucked things up, and how we ought to reverse the damage.
Yes, security is much better. Yes, it's amazing that more attacks have not taken place.
It's more than amazing, it's impossible.
First, assume with me that the people and organizations which orchestrated 9/11 would very much like to do it again in some form, or something worse if they can manage it. I think that's more than a reasonable assumption. So the motivation is certainly there. And yet, it's been over eight years, and nothing has happened. Why is that?
The "security" at airports and elsewhere is a joke, and known by all participants to be a joke. I witnessed a little old lady in a wheelchair being carefully wanded at the gate one day. Sure. She's a real potential threat, huh. An intelligent conspiracy would find evading our "security" measures the least of their worries; they'd solve that one in the first five minutes of their first planning session. The only people we're stopping are the really stupid ones, like the guy with the bomb in his shoe. OK, it's worthwhile to stop nuts like that, but the people who planned 9/11 weren't that stupid, far from it.
Tapping everyone's phone, reading everyone's library check-out list and similar measures? You have to be kidding. No terrorist with two brain cells to rub together would be caught by such measures. All that craziness does is undermine our freedom, and it doesn't even do a very good job at that.
Invading middle Eastern countries? As observed, the terrorists merely relocate promptly to places we cannot reach, like Pakistan. I think we disrupted their organization and their supply lines in Afghanistan during the first few months, but they've had plenty of time to re-group.
No measure that has been made public, alone or together, explains this remarkable lack of follow-up. I conclude, then, that someone somewhere is doing something right; we obviously don't know much about who or what. But something. This isn't happening all by itself.
The other conclusion is that 9/11 was a 'black swan' event -- e.g. OBL got 'lucky' in a way that Shoko Asahara did not.
It's worth noting, by the way, part of the reason that OBL got lucky on 9/11 was that he relinquished a lot of control over the 9/11 plotters.
The downside for AQ may well have been that the post-9/11 attention set back their effort to destabilize and infiltrate the Pakistani state.
Andrew: "If you calculate the costs of that evil attack against the financial, moral and human costs of the fight back, 9/11 was a fantastic demonstration of the power of asymmetry to destroy the West."
I have a really big problem with that word "destroy". They destroyed a building and killed some people. That isn't "The West". They do not, repeat NOT, pose an existential threat to us. Unless we go nuts with paranoid fantasies and let go of that very thing, "of the people, by the people, for the people", which makes us.
I'm not saying it wasn't a bad thing. It was a bad thing. Horrible, painful. But there's no threat here to destroy the West. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. These clowns (not to be insensitive but this calls for a little lebowski: 'buncha fig-eaters wearing towels on their heads, tryin to find reverse on a soviet tank') are no existential-threat-greater-than-USSR. the best that these delusional murderers can do on that front is, con-man style, get us to hurt ourselves by overcommitting, betraying our own principles, running around chasing phantoms and draining our budgets and military all over the world.
Jay, I think that's actually his point--that our overreaction and paranoid fantasies are the real killer. He's arguing that this is ultimate threat of Al Qaeda--not the destruction of the country, but provoking an overreaction in which we destroy ourselves.
Bingo. "They" haven't attacked us again because they don't need to. Our country is like a big windup toy...just let it go.
Doubling down on that, here's the intro to the piece:
I may have this wrong, but I really thought he was saying that our reaction was the real issue, our need to express "unrivaled" power.
It was in this here website's dead-tree 150th anniversary that David Foster Wallace postulated his idea of the 9/11 victims being a "cost" of our free society.
It's a dark thought, but it really got me thinking differently about nearly all talk of terrorism. Not sure what position I'm at, I guess, but once you can accept the idea of an unsolvable side effect to a good thing, it changes you.
Perhaps not so much a dark thought as a dark reality. I hope that some day we can come to terms with the tragic aspects of life and still remain vigilant against people who try and capitalize on such horrors . Perhaps we gain from trying to put them into some context, as the Prez. did quite eloquently, but I do worry that by moving us forward too quickly/easily back into our familiar themes of progress that we never really absorb these kinds of existential limits in/to our understanding/control.
In other words: freedom isn't free. The wingnuts butcher the phrase, but this is what it really means.
Agreed.
This defeatism is insane. Dems/Progressives/Libs are supposed to be the governing party. We can't just lie down because a few sleeper cells are testing our mettle. It's absurd to say that terrorists are destroying the West. They have a crazy ideology, but we have American-tested and bipartisan-approved methods for confronting this kind of stuff. We're also developing those methods in conjunction with a progressive worldview. That's why we have the Truman National Security Project, for instance. Democrats can fight terrorists. America is looking for leadership on that front, not pessimism. The two are mutually exclusive at this historical moment. It's time to pick up this fight, and to do so with authority. If you're not part of the next solution, you are part of the problem.
Authority is a useful tool. The same is true for many bugaboos of the Left: hierarchy, social control, communal norms, the traditional family, the police, nationalism, capitalism, and “U!S!A!” chants are all capable of producing socially productive results when deployed with dexterity and forethought. That’s why I recently called for Democrats to lead a bipartisan rally against the Hasan wingnuts harassing people on the sidewalks of New York City. I mean, just imagine if Dems were leading the crowds instead of incendiary conservatives like Palin or Bachmann. We could take proper precautions to make our counter-rallies peaceful and tolerant, in stark contrast with the ugly, threat-laden streetside sermons of Revolution Muslim. The spectacle of radically reasonable Americans would probably go viral, illustrating to a global YouTube audience that we are resilient and dedicated to stability, both at home and abroad.
American as always,
Brown Bourne
Blog: http://brownbourne.wordpress.com/
ROll: http://brownbourne.wikidot.com
The problem with your logic is that it resembles that behind Austria-Hungary's response to Gavrilo Princip.
The got the terrorist... and did a pretty good job of destroying his state sponsor.
Unfortunately, their response misconstrued the true existential threats.
All politics, weather, security, and 9/11 is local.
"1.) A consistent overestimation of American might. The notion that American "can do anything," and what it fails to do is a reflection of its leadership, not its people."
sorry TNC, but I could not disagree more. Americans can do anything, for the most part. A failure to do so is OFTEN a reflection of our leadership. For example: had we wanted to, we would have "won" both wars and stopped terrorists emerging from Afghanistan or Iraq had we wanted to. And we could have done it without losing a single American soldier. We could have launched a massive air campaign, or cruise missile campaign that would have leveled all of Afghanistan and Iraq, without losing a single soldier. Our decision not to do so was a political calculation made by our leaders that doing so would have cost too much in collateral damage, too many civilian casualties. In fact, we could wipe both countries off the map, even without nukes, if we wanted to. While those decisions would have drawn such international criticism as to render us a pariah, nobody would have been able to a damn thing about it militarily. Like it or not, it was a POLITICAL calculation to preserve civilian life at the expense of our soldiers and budget, made by our leaders.
And I should note, I never would have favored this approach, and I do not favor it now, but we COULD have done it. Politicians decided not to.
You know, I am probably going to regret doing this but here I go anyway.
"Our decision not to do so was a political calculation made by our leaders that doing so would have cost too much in collateral damage, too many civilian casualties."
When you level an entire country, there is no such thing as collateral damage. The term for what you are describing is genocide. And I don't think I want to talk about America and genocide in the same post.
If you check on Wikipedia, it is reported that the war in Iraq has caused the violent death of somewhere between 100,000-600,000 people, and has been responsible in general for the death of between 100,000-1,000,000 Iraqis. You can also find that the population of Iraq is about 30,000,000 people. If you trust the lower estimates for deaths due to the war, then it has been responsible for the death of 0.5% of the Iraqi population since 2003; the upper estimates would put the number at about 3%.
I'm actually familiar with these numbers. I'm just not sure what you are trying to say.
Yes, the US government precipitated the war in Iraq. Because the US government had no real plan for the occupation for years after the fall of Baghdad and didn't take the insurgents seriously at first, hundreds of thousand of people died unnecessary violent deaths.
As horrible as the last several years have been for the people of Iraq, it does not approach the textbook definition of genocide. Not that I think anyone deserves a medal.....though L. Paul Bremer got one.
You are right about the political constraints. But you are posing the historical reality against a theoretical construct of 'absolute war.'
Clausewitz 101: in reality, war is _always_ a continuation of politics by other means. The idea the one could untangle the "Clausewitzian trinity" is a fundamental, (characteristically Anglo-Saxon), misapprehension of the nature of war.
9/11 was an inside job.
the 9/11 truth movement has the facts.
here's a tidbit:
nano-thermite brought down those towers in controlled demolitions.
explain the pools of molten iron that burned in the sub-basements of each tower for weeks after. no official has.
TNC, is this your first 9/11 truther?! Certainly in my relatively brief time. If so, congrats!!!!
Yeah, I think I'll leave it here as a kind of performance art.
care to respond with facts?
didn't think so.
Hey! Maybe that's my boyfriend in disguise!
The small sentences and lack of caps add to the arty feel, I think.
Performance art... nicely put.
I thought Jay Parini covered this pretty well in a poem he published in 2003.
After the Terror
Everything has changed, though nothing has.
They’ve changed the locks on almost every door,
and windows have been bolted just in case.
It’s business as usual, someone says.
Is anybody left to mind the store?
Everything has changed, though nothing has.
The same old buildings huddle in the haze
with faces at the windows, floor by floor,
the windows they have bolted just in case.
No cause for panic, they maintain, because
the streets go places they have been before.
Everything has changed, though nothing has.
We’re still a country that is ruled by laws.
The system’s working, and it’s quite a bore
that windows have been bolted just in case.
Believe in victory and all that jazz.
Believe we’re better off, that less is more.
Everything has changed, though nothing has.
The windows have been bolted just in case.
It's the repeated lines that make this poem for me--the acknowledgement that while we claim everything has changed, really we're the same people doing the same things we were before, only we're hiding behind these windows we've bolted just in case. But we don't hide behind them for long, because we chafe at restrictions the further we get in time from the occurrence which triggered our fear in the first place.
But it's cynicism in the first line of the last stanza that really echoes true for me--"Believe in victory and all that jazz"--because anyone who would honestly argue that this is a winnable battle (whatever this battle is--the great undefined struggle is what we're in the middle of) is too naive to bother with.
People tend to look at 9/11 as if it were a moment that existed outside of history. Or as if it were a new beginning after the "end of history." Not so long before 9/11 we had the New World Order. After we had Homeland Security. And an entertainment industry that is colossal. I can remember seeing The Harder They Come, The Harder They Fall when it first came out. And those words ring as true today to me as they did then.
We are so far away from places like the Congo, we fail to note the far more aberrant and telling events there in which a war that has to do with a hundred different causes, many local, many pan African, colonial and post colonial, the wake of the cold war global proxy ping pong match, many that go back through the past half millenium of plunder, not the least of which who gets paid for the coltan that is essential to our cell phone and lap top lifestyle, leads to the rapes of 150,000 + women, a phenomenon so stark in its undercutting of basic humanity that we cannot comprehend its significance. How can it occur that soldiers defending a country can enter into rape of its own nation's women and then defend it by pointing out how the brutality of the enemy is worse?
Our nation is mired in debt that funds our outre lifestyle. Our private consumer debt is $8,500/individual citizen, man, woman, child. Our public debt is 30 grand more. And that's just the principal. US Taxpayers currently are responsible for a military budget that is larger than that of China, France, UK, Russia, Germany, Japan, Italy, Saudi Arabia, and India combined. We are addicted to war, we are addicted to guns, we are addicted to oil.
Environmental pressures world wide, not only climate change but the more insistent problem of drinking water, are creating a world in which life has become increasingly unbearable for large portions of humanity.
We have a world in diaspora and extreme polarities of wealth and poverty. We talk about our immigration problems here, but have a hard time realizing what conditions elsewhere must be if children on their own are traveling great distances to enter the United States.
It is hard not to be pessimistic or worse, numb. We get het up, and understandably so, when some guy goes off his rocker and kills a dozen or more folks, because strangely those are numbers we can do something with. 3 and half million people in the world annually dying from water related diseases breaks our collective gestalt.
Americans need to understand this about history: no one stays on top of the heap. I can remember when Bob Dylan first put out All Along The Watchtower, but more than ever, don't these lines ring true? "Businessmen, they drink my wine; plowmen dig my earth; none of them all along the line seem to know what any of it is worth."
The audacity of hope bogs down in the slow work ahead of us, but as to nationalism: I believe that Obama's election was a result of an American longing for which an election ultimately seems to drain our energy for the harder work. I believe we will have some health care reform because that's really what the American people want. I believe that gay marriage is an inevitability here. And I believe humanity will come to its senses vis a vis environmental issues, although perhaps too late, however forgiving mother nature. But I cannot see how given our national view of the world and history, we will sooner or later avoid our "Horse, a horse, a kingdom for a horse" moment for which 9/11 has turned out so far to be a weak immunization.
seem to have stumbled on an intellectual blowhard.
howzya?
Too true, alas. Hope you didn't fall when you stumbled.
No!
Never reply directly! It's like Medusa, you'll turn to stone...or something.
CitE - We love how hard you blow.
uh oh the guy with the ten lb hammer ......
He's done. Sorry about that.
meh trolls happen, I always wonder if these folks are out there lurking all along or if they have some kind of search bots, seems that whenever we get near topics like gun-control, gay-rights, or obviously now 9/11 we take a trip on the Beck side, maybe next time we can get some ralph steadman illustrations for the thread.
http://www.ralphsteadman.com/
... and now for something completely different.
anyone here care to discuss what the anthrax attacks revealed?
you remember those right... they began less than one week after the 9/11 attack and targeted members of the "librul media" and select state officials, most notably the biggest opponents to the patriot act... remember? do you also recall how our government immediately tried to pin those attacks on iraq? at that time we had, as a nation, received a state of of the union address from the national cathedral -- with the joint chiefs of staff sitting in the front row as though granting audience to george w bush's morning sermon "terrah".
and remember how at that time the taliban merely asked for the evidence linking bin laden to 9/11, saying that they'd hand him over? i think it was colin powell who promised a "white paper" which would enumerate said evidence... but it was never presented. why not? oh yes, because it was easier to simply invade afghanistan, that's why. strike while the iron's hot and all that, right? to this day, no solid evidence has been presented... and even fbi spokesman rex tomb says that “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Osama bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.”
and regarding the anthrax attacks, if i recall correctly: isn't the FBI's star suspect a rather conveniently suicided US government bio-terror scientist?
and didn't someone in this same thread make a quip about conspiracy theory -- as if these alleged conspiracies never occur, right?
you people are too funny... i wonder how many of you fancy yourselves as students of history?
http://odeo.com/episodes/24974958-Michael-Parenti-Conspiracy-Theory-and-Class-Power-Part-1
http://odeo.com/episodes/24974957-Michael-Parenti-Conspiracy-Theory-and-Class-Power
I hate to be Eurocentric, and I mean no disrespect to neighbors and friends of friends who died in the towers. 9/11 may turn out to have been a world-historical event.
But, especially on the 11th day of the 11th month, I'd argue we need think much more about the meaning of June 28th, 1914.