The United States exacerbated the tragedy of 9/11 by failing to seize on an opportunity to reflect on its behavior in the world, and choosing instead a path of pointless death and destruction.
Matthew McKenna
While the initial impact of the first plane struck at about 8:46 am, the news of a plane crash did not come into my radar until about an hour later. Some 30 miles north of the World Trade Center, details of the event that has decided the path of the 21st century was relayed to me in a rather underwhelming fashion. A classmate asked me if my parents worked in New York City. When I responded that they did, he told me that they’d probably be arriving home late because bridges had been closed because a plane had crashed. I had not really thought much of the vague description, so class continued with me not even considering the incident until the following period. As math class began, in a huge escalation of the vague events I had heard earlier, the teacher briefly mentioned that both of the Twin Towers had collapsed. She also proceeded to teach her lesson about the quadratic formula (totally guessing!) as if the trajectory of the world hadn’t just immeasurably shifted. That trajectory was not clear at the moment, but everyone in the United States likely knew that serious US action was about to take place. There were opportunities afforded to the United States on 9/11, some of which were declined, while others were seized upon. Nearly two decades later, it’s abundantly clear that the wrong lessons were learned from that day. Worse, the wrong opportunities were taken. Resultantly, the greatest chance that the US has had to help forge a more harmonious world was squandered in favor of a path of bloodlust and destruction. This was all accomplished by a US political establishment that has never been held accountable for their malfeasance.
A Chance for Self Reflection
Part of the reason that the events of September 11th have been elevated to the gold standard of national tragedies in Americans’ collective memory is because of the dearth of other similar examples. There have been very few acts of destructive war on American soil. Of course, America as an expanding empire has brought the extreme violence in form of the tragedies of slavery and indigenous genocide to the North American continent, and this level of extreme violence cannot be overstated. However, in terms of foreign powers visiting extreme violence on the inhabitants of the United States, the incidents are quite rare. Outside of a few conflicts, all of the destructive effects of America’s military engagements have been borne by distant nations, or in the case of the wars on the indigenous peoples, far off on the frontiers. Even the 1941 Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor maintained a physical and psychological distance from the American people. Hawaii sat some 2,500 miles west of an already distant American West Coast. The Islands themselves were an imperial possession, gained by the United States through dubious means half a century earlier. Additionally, the infamous event of 1941, albeit tragic and war inducing, was an attack on a military target. This was not the bombing of a civilian city, as the temporarily victimized US would later inflict many times over on the Japanese people. American civilians have never been targeted before or since the way that they were on 9/11, and thus the events maintain an elevated stature in our lists of national tragedies. Unlike the nations that the US had waged industrial scale violence on like Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Korea, and Iraq, the list of tragic attacks on our homeland remains short, and thus quite easy to narrow down to the worst. In other words, for Americans, war is a phenomenon that destroys cities, cripples civilian infrastructure, displaces families, and kills people at a mass scale, but it remains a violence that happens “over there.” The fact that such destruction of war has almost never touched American cities is why 9/11 stands out and remains so prescient in the American mind.
A Tale of Two Tragedies
Sometimes it is worth asking a provocative question in an effort to establish intellectual consistency or expose a deficit of it. To that end I’ll ask, which was a more callous attack; The Al Qaeda 9/11 attacks or the 2003 US aerial bombardment of Iraq? Both were horrific events, but only one enjoys national remembrance in the United States. When the US began its (newest) attack on Iraq in 2003, the events’ portrayal in national media seemed like an action movie. “Shock and Awe” was a sanitizing name for what would more accurately be termed “death from the sky.” US media covered the event with a tone of restrained excitement, barely containing their bloodlust. Compare that with the sober tone displayed across the board 18 months earlier, as footage of the 9/11 attacks was aired on all major networks. There is no reason that the images 9/11 attacks should seem any more visually disturbing than the Shock and Awe footage. The New York attacks targeted two buildings whereas “Shock and Awe” targeted cities all around Iraq, most notably the capital, Baghdad. Obviously American exceptionalism, nationalism jingoism, and racism create the situation wherein the Shock and Awe footage does not hold the same horrifying status as the 9/11 footage. But what might a defender of such an asymmetrical reactions to such similarly terrible attacks say?
They might argue that 9/11’s events are less morally defensible because they targeted civilians who did not have anything to do with Al Qaeda’s stated grievances against the US. The problem with this statement comes from a simple statistical analysis. The death tolls from the respective events point to a double standard, with the New York and DC attacks claiming just under 3,000 lives, while the Shock and Awe bombardments killed roughly 7,000 Iraqi civilians in just the first month, of what would be an exponentially more deadly conflict. Whether civilians were “targeted” or not, this was the likely outcome of bombing campaigns in densely populated urban centers. The defense that the bombing of Baghdad, a city of 7 million, was done “responsibly” with “surgical” accuracy, would require the question: would there be a “responsible” way to bomb New York City, a city of relatively the same population? That does not even factor in the several times larger count of Iraqi soldiers exterminated in Shock and Awe. Now of course, in all armed conflict the distinction between soldiers and civilians is an important one, but here too the lines become blurred. Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration and their stenographers in the media launched a massive PR campaign. The goal of this effort was to illustrate that Saddam Hussein sat at the top of brutal authoritarian regime One true aspect of that authoritarian government, was the reality of conscription. Iraq’s military was not an all volunteer force (as the US is currently) and thus those soldiers killed were simply Iraqis that were unfortunate enough to be drafted into Saddam’s doomed military.
Still, one might argue that the Iraqi government and Hussein were given an ultimatum, to flee the country or face this violence. Months earlier, the compliant US congress gave the president bipartisan approval to use military action on Iraq as he saw fit. Given the long time plans to invade Iraq, this was a de facto declaration of war. Therefore, isn’t the carnage the responsibility of Hussein and his government for not complying with the demands that he faced under the threat of certain destruction? This rationale only holds up if one ignores that Hussein had made many overtures, including a Hail Mary attempt offering major concessions to the US just prior to the invasion. It also fails to address the fact that the exact same type of declaration of war ultimatum was also given to the US prior to the 9/11 attacks.
Exactly How Much did they Hate Our Freedom?
Osama Bin Laden had eschewed his former allies of the Soviet Afghanistan War during the build up to and outbreak of the Gulf War in 1990 and 1991. His hostility to the Americans did not come from his sympathies for the secular dictator Saddam Hussein (who he viewed as an enemy) but rather the fact that the Saudi monarchy had permitted the United States to garrison their country, the most holy land of Islam, with military bases and personnel. After Hussein’s forces had invaded neighboring Kuwait, the Americans were all too happy to leverage Saudi (misguided) fear of an Iraqi invasion into a stronger American footing in the Middle East. This was after the construction magnate had been rebuffed in his offer to defend the kingdom from Iraq himself with his militias. The US bases in Saudi Arabia remained in place long after Desert Shield and Desert Storm concluded, serving as a continued American insult to Bin Laden. The relationship turned even more hostile in the mid 90’s as the disaffected Saudi took note of what he perceived as the West’s blatant devaluation of the lives of Muslims, pointing specifically to the US support for Israel’s violence toward Lebanese and Palestinian Muslims.
In 1996, Bin Laden had committed to the act that would define the remaining 15 years of his life. His declaration of war on the United States went relatively unnoticed in the Western world, but the 30 page fatwa articulated his grievances against the world’s unipolar power. While the man was certainly a religious fanatic, his grievances were rather terrestrial. Articulated in the fatwa most prominently, was his dissatisfaction regarding the American military troops based in the Holy Land. Excluding the religious element of this issue, Americans should be able to identify with this outrage. In the mythical American Revolution story, one of the major grievances of the colonists was the imperial British army’s occupation of the colonies. Bin Laden also pointed to American armed support for Israel’s overt mistreatment of Muslims in both Gaza and Lebanon, citing specifically the Israel massacre of Lebanese civilians at Qana. He included language condemning the US support for secular Arab dictators, themselves known for the brutal tactics against their domestic populations. Additionally, Bin Laden joined former UN officials in condemning the 1990’s US sanctions of Iraq, which he identified (correctly) as having killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. But was this cause for war? Bin Laden was neither Iraqi, Lebanese or Palestinian. However, he was a devout Muslim. Not all people organize around the idea of national identity, and for some, it is superseded by a religious identify. This may seem strange to secular societies, but historically, it is quite common place. The modern nation state is barely a two centuries old, while religions often trace their origins to much earlier eras. Author Scott Horton explains in his signature work, Fool’s Errand, how a militant defense of one’s co religionists should not be that surprising. When New York and Washington DC were attacked in 2001, Americans from as far away as Hawaii signed up for a war in the Middle East as an act of retribution for their deceased compatriots. This is similar to how Bin Laden and his followers declared war on the United States for its violence visited on Muslims from Lebanon to Iraq to Gaza, even though Bin Laden was not a resident of any of those locations. Bin Laden was clear in both his 1996 declaration and his 1997 CNN interview that the US must cease in the aforementioned hostilities against the Muslim world. Yet, the US did not alter any of these policies. Of course, none of this remotely justifies Bin Laden’s massacre of Americans and others. However, neither does any justification for the carnage induced by Shock and Awe hold up under the premise that Hussein had been warned that there would be violence if he did not change course.
And what about these policies? Is it forever the policy of the United States to never reflect on its own conduct toward the world just because some alleged enemy draws attention to it? If ever there was ever a time for reevaluation, it was after the September 11th attacks. As detailed earlier. the attacks were motivated by much more tangible grievances, and ones that most of humanity could identity with. It is not unheard of or a sign of weakness when governments alter their policy because said policy is likely to create violence against its people. Spain ended its participation in the occupation of Iraq after the 2004 Madrid train bombings. Its domestic population viewed Spain’s participation of an imperial occupation as not worth the risk of violence being visited on the Spanish people as a consequence.
We Don’t Negotiate with Terrorists… But You Should
Of course, in the US, we expect other countries to alter their own policies when facing the threat of our own violence. After these same September 11th attacks, the United States quickly leveled the prospect of violence against the Taliban government of Afghanistan, demanding that they alter their policy of giving refuge to Bin Laden. If we expected the Taliban to reevaluate their policy of harboring a group that killed 3000 Americans, then would it be absurd for the United States after 9/11 to reevaluate policies that help to subjugate and kill millions of Arabs? That this is even a controversial idea points to the American exceptionalism inherent in any discussion wherein the US would be expected to make concessions. This type of reflection about how US actions might increase the likelihood of terrorism was not present amongst US officials, with President Bush dismissing the attacks as being the result of a hatred of American freedom emanating from the Muslim world. Osama Bin Laden himself best countered this lie in 2004 when he explained, that if the hatred of freedom thesis was true, then, “Why did we not attack Sweden?” The answer to this question would require a deep reflection that America is yet to prove capable of. The failure to understand that a foreign policy that is responsible for the destruction of millions of lives around the globe makes the next tragedy more likely. Indeed, if Venezuelans, Iranians, or Yemenis ever seek retribution for the misery the United States had besieged on them, I anticipate we will hear some of the same tone deaf, “jealous of our freedom” rhetoric.
Squandering the Moment of Sympathy
There had never been a more opportune moment to reorient US policy in the world to one of peace and international cooperation than after the September 11th attacks. This was a time of global empathy and sympathy for the injured superpower. Even though describing the attacks as “unprovoked” is hardly accurate, the rest of the world recognized that these were horrific acts of violence against civilians who held little control over their government’s policies. To that end, America became the subject of global condolence giving. The sympathy and support poured in from both allies and alleged enemies. Adversarial relationships that existed, or would develop in years to come could have been repaired or avoided entirely.
Helping the School Yard Bully Dust off His Knees after a Fall
Some of these sympathetic alleged adversaries included nations that had long been subjects of American hostility. Cuba, who had faced US violence and subversion since its revolution in 1959, condemned the attacks and offered medical supplies. Palestinian leaders, even with the experience of American armed Israeli aggression, made a public display of donating blood to the September 11 relief effort. Even after decades of conflict with America, Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi quickly condemned the attacks and urged Muslim aid groups to offer help, “regardless of regardless of political considerations.” He went on to state that,”It is a human duty to show sympathy with the American people, and be with them at these horrifying and awesome events which are bound to awaken human conscience.”
Iran, the nation whose populace by 2001 had endured half a century of US aggression, offered perhaps the most moving gestures of kindness. Aside from the condemnation of the attacks by leadership in both secular and religious terms, the Iranian people themselves demonstrated global solidarity with their American brethren. This included candlelight vigils for the victims in the streets of Tehran and even a 60,000 person strong minute long moment of silence observed for the victims at Tehran’s soccer stadium. Given its own history with terrorism, Iran proceeded to be a willing partner in the US efforts to bring Al Qaeda to justice. This included arresting Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters who has crossed into Iran from Afghanistan and providing intelligence to US officials in their new efforts to apprehend the perpetrators of the attacks.
That the legitimately aggrieved people of nations that the United States has exacted is violence on could still express their grief for the American victims of terrorism is a testament to a prioritization of common humanity. They placed a value on global solidarity above the narrow construct of national identity. This was a sign of the potential for a development of a real concept of global citizenship and the possibility for international cooperation toward resolving humanities pressing issues. Had it been capitalized on, we’d have had our first steps toward an international solidarity in remedying our shared plagues of nuclear weaponry, the Covid 19 outbreak, climate change, and war. Of course this would have required the United States electing to pursue the opportunity that it was presented by the tragedy. However, America was out for blood, and the concept of global solidarity is anathema to American exceptionalism. Such a concept would render our believed superiority obsolete, and thus was not even considered.
September 12th and Ever Since
The disturbing reality is that even the greatest tragedies offer opportunities to those willing to take advantage. Magnifying the horror of any tragedy aside from its human cost, is when opportunistic actors use it to promote a path that will undoubtedly create greater suffering. After 9/11, those who would have pushed for the global sympathy to be maneuvered into a plan for global peace, were pushed aside, as there was already an alternate plan in place, waiting for the opportune time to be put into place. The 3,000 Americans killed presented a chance for a neoconservative wing of the Republican party to put forth an agenda that had been established years earlier.
Surrender Isn’t Good Enough for Us!
Whether it was a demand for blood or a seizing upon an opportunity to enrich certain interests, the path taken by the US after 9/11 was a destructive one. In response to the peoples of the earth offering their condolences, America began a detached campaign of terror. The first misguided step in this devolution was to invade Afghanistan, a nation that the United States had help to put into its continuing state of chaos just a decade and a half earlier. The Taliban government, while gripped in Civil War that had partially been the result of US actions, had given refuge to Osama Bin Laden. This was not an endorsement of his war against the United States but rather an honoring of Pashtun guest rights, which require that a host does not hand over their guest to enemies. While broadly sharing a religious faith, the Taliban leadership did not share the rich Saudi’s mission for war against the west and often rejected it out of hand. Mullah Omar and his compatriots knew that Bin Laden’s provocations against the US could one day lead to American bombs falling in Central Asia. He lamented often about the tenuous nature of their relationship with their disobedient tenant stating that Bin laden was like a chicken bone “that I can neither swallow or spit out.” He was referring to the idea that Bin Laden’s very presence was endangering his government while at the same time acknowledging that to extradite him would be a loss of his legitimacy amongst his Pashtun constituency.
A demand for blood in the US political, military, and civilian establishment proved Omar’s fears to be correct. Despite a Taliban offer to hand over Bin Laden to another Muslim country if the US presented evidence, the demand for unconditional extradition meant bombs would start falling on Afghanistan in October of 2001. They continue to fall 19 years later. In the interim, the US had many opportunities to end this war. These included the immediate attempts of the Taliban to give up Bin Laden, and the complete surrender of the Taliban in December of 2001. Another opportunity was presented after nearly a decade into a failed a bloody misadventure. Both State department and military officials cautioned President Obama to abandon the doomed mission because it could not be achieved. They were ignored as the US launched “The Surge,” prolonging the dubious US occupation of central Asia. Obama’s successor ran a charlatan presidential campaign on ending foreign wars but has proved dishonest, escalating the Afghanistan war in his first two years significantly despite words to the contrary. Even today, two decades into the conflict, as the Taliban controls the most ground it has since 2001, both Republicans and Democrats maneuver to ensure that soldiers who were not even born on 9/11/2001 will continue to fight and kill Afghans also unborn on that fateful day.
Neo Con Conmen
To say it was solely bloodlust that motivated the next major invasion conducted by the US would be to ignore plans that were already in place. One does not have to go down a “Loose Changesque” conspiracy theory rabbit hole to appreciate that there were actors within the Bush administration that saw 9/11 as an opportunity to put into action an agenda that had long been in the works. This was not the agenda of peace that was offered due to the unique sympathy the US garnered at the time but an agenda of international aggression and internal suppression. The Project for a New American century was a hawkish think tank of neoconservatives seeking to assert US hegemonic power in the new millennium. In their own words, this meant expanding US military power and toppling governments. Prior to 9/11, this group thought of their own agenda as being unlikely to implemented “barring some cataclysmic Pearl Harbor like event.” They got such an event in late summer of 2001.
The rest is history. The PNAC neoconservatives, deeply infested in the Bush administration got their totally illegal and unjustifiable, preemptive war on Iraq. Their democrat acolytes got their surveillance state. The more nefarious characters in the Bush administration like Dick Cheney and David Addington got their unitary executive, increasing the executive branch’s power. This is power Bush’s successor, Obama was especially fond of. Rather than rolling the abuses of the Bush administration back, Obama expanded the abuses of the war on terror in nearly every way possible. Aside from prosecuting whistleblowers and expanding domestic surveillance, he even dabbled in assassination of Americans. If Cheney and Addington believed themselves to be experts in legalize jujitsu to have accomplished establishing a global torture program, without facing international or domestic prosecution, imagine how Obama must have viewed his own execution of a 16-year-old American citizen that went unnoticed by the American populace?
If the United States’ foreign policy before the September 11th attacks gave it a less than benevolent reputation in the Arab world, then the course it has taken since has assured that much of the rest of the world would share this view. This further denigration was accomplished through unilateral military action, disregard for declarations of the United Nations, and reckless hostility to the international criminal court.
Trading Shoes
In the backdrop of all of the United States’ belligerent and actions since 9/11, there is the backdrop of American exceptionalism. The human cost of these actions in terms of those killed, maimed and displaced should be damning enough, but for who are still true believers in the “mission,” it’s worth posing hypothetical situation once more. It is not a risky hypothesis to state that if any other nation had taken similar actions to the US in the past two decades, they would be condemned severely if not attacked by the United States. Imagine it was China that had a global assassination program, unbound by borders, executing foreigners (and its own citizens) with little accountability or oversight. Picture that it was Cuba that had sanctioned extraordinary rendition (kidnapping) as policy and proceeded to abduct citizens of other nations around the world, often to torture them and then keep them detained indefinitely. Suppose Iran had invaded half a dozen countries in the Americas, accomplished the complete destruction of those governments, and then had the audacity claim that it was the United States that was the destabilizing force in the Western hemisphere (as our leaders portray Iran’s role in the Middle East.)
We actually do have small examples of how the United States reacts to similar (if much smaller scale actions). In 2014, American leadership was quick to condemn the Russian incursion into Ukraine, a country on its border in which it maintains significant support. This condemnation was done with no sense of irony given the US’s own recent invasions. The US invasion of Iraq, on the other side of the planet, was conducted under far more dubious justifications, with exponentially more destructive results than the Russian involvement in its bordering nation. Recently, the United States leveled the harsh Ceasar Act sanctions on Syria, with the effect of putting the Syrian people into deprivation. This was justified by US officials by the accusations of torture that were leveled at the Assad government. This must appear especially hypocritical for several reasons. To start, nearly half the documented instances of torture were perpetrated by (US supported) anti-government militias. Secondly, let alone the fact that the US government itself has a horrible record itself from the last 20 years, the US had also in the past been a totally willing partner in torture with Syrian government. The United States condemns Iran’s support for militias in Syria and Yemen, while its own armed militias have reaped havoc on the people of Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq. Specifically, with regard to Yemen, Iran’s (mostly verbal) support for Houthis pales in comparison to the destruction caused by the US support for Saudi Arabia in its genocidal war on the Yemeni people. It is not surprising that non-Americans can easily identify this hypocrisy. This, combined with an American unrivaled propensity for violence unbound by international law, undoubtedly has many of the globe’s citizen’s living in fear of Uncle Sam. Subsequently, it is hardly shocking that poll after poll demonstrate much of the world views the United States as the greatest existential threat to human kind.
It Doesn’t Even Work on It’s Own Terms!
The problem with the “War on Terror” that the US has pursued, is that it does not even work on its own terms. The concept of a war on a tactic is vague and not constrained by time and space. To that end, the US has found itself fighting alleged terror groups that weren’t even in existence when the war started. Even so, by some very clear measures, the war is failing. Al Qaeda had a few hundred members in 2001, many of whom were killed in the initial US onslaught in Afghanistan. By targeting them, the US gave the group fame and recruiting power, to the point where two decades later, they now boast 40,000 members, with many other extremist groups pledging allegiance to them. Bin Laden would be proud, as he had planned to grow his violent perversion of Islam by portraying the West as directly at war with Muslims. As a result of US intervention, the group is now present throughout the Arab world and North Africa.
Secondly, the War on Terror was evidently not based on very firm principles. While the US spent years targeting Al Qaeda (and conversely helping their recruiting power through the routine killing of civilians), the story shifted in the last decade. The mission originally spoken of in terms of “freedom” and “resolve” was quickly redirected as new geopolitical goals emerged. It is well documented that the nation that had resolved to fight terror, has been on the literal same side as Al Qaeda in the destruction of Libya in 2011, the intervention in Syria beginning in 2012, and the genocidal war on Yemen in 2015 (and continuing.) The US was apparently not so aggrieved by the attacks of 9/11 that it would refrain from aiding the organization that perpetrated them just a decade years later. Not only did the US choose a path of destruction after 9/11, it pursued a path of inconsistency and hypocrisy.
Bin Laden had hoped that the US would engage in a foreign adventure into Central Asia and the Arab world. As much he detailed to his son, who later relayed it to Rolling Stone, “My father’s dream was to bring the Americans to Afghanistan.” The late Al Qaeda leader was elated when Bush was elected, satisfied that he would “attack and spend money and break the country.” Some $6 trillion later, it would be hard to dispute that the deceased Bin Laden succeeded. That, combined with the fact that the post-9/11 wars still persist in the face of strong domestic opposition, particularly amongst those who have fought in these failed efforts, points to a degradation of democracy.. As Americans face increased surveillance, infringement on civil liberties, and constant fear mongering, it’s fair to say that Bin Laden’s dream of destroying American democracy is close to being realized.
The path taken since 9/11 has been the antithesis of the path of global cooperation that was offered on those days of mourning that followed the tragedy. Rather than a move toward a diplomacy based on humanity’s common interests and goals, the United States has pursued a path of perpetuating its asymmetrical power. Cooperation currently exists only through coercion under threat of an increasingly reactive superpower. In the end, the cooperation is doomed, as no power can maintain that coercive capability in perpetuity. In the interim, the United States will continue to become more domestically militarized and global animosity toward the superpower will grow, creating a less secure world for all of us. Those that died on 9/11 represent a great American tragedy. That tragedy was exponentially compounded by the destructive path that America took in response.