Dawn is breaking with an amber glow and record heat is predicted. Last night I met friends at a local wine bar and came home and kind of wandered around here, feeling restless. Then I sat down to write by hand, an activity that’s always calming.
I wanted to say something about this the sixth anniversary of the September 11th attacks on Washington D.C. and the World Trade Center. And as I wrote, I found warring instincts within me. Part of me wants to rant about how the attacks were preventable. Part of me wants to weep. Part of me wants to pierce this day of remembrance with logic.
We live in a time of political smokescreens and slick propaganda—as evidenced by General Petraeus appearing today again before Congress with the latest batch of smoke and bogus statistics. He keeps talking about whether “the surge” is working and when we can start withdrawing troops from what has become the hellhole of Middle East. But what is missing from his rhetoric and lies and obfuscations is why we’re there in the first place. And it always comes back to our irrational and intemperate response to the 9/11 attacks.
On salon.com today Gary Kamiya has written The real lessons of 9/11. He writes: “Sept. 11 is a totemic date for the Bush administration. It justifies everything, explains everything, ends all argument. It is the crime that must be eternally punished, the wound that can never heal, the moral high ground that can never be taken. Bush's reaction to 9/11 was to declare a "war on terror," of which the Iraq adventure was said to be the "front line." The American establishment signed off on this war because of 9/11. To oppose Bush's "war on terror" was to risk another terror attack and dishonor our dead. The establishment has now turned against the Iraq front, but it has not questioned the "war on terror" itself, or the assumptions on which it is based.”
Today the flags in Oregon are flying at half mast. I think this should be a day of mourning not only for the orphans and widows of the attacks, but also for our soldiers who have died needlessly, the Iraqi citizens slaughtered by the thousands, for their country which lies in shreds, for our weak Congress, our broken government, our damaged reputation abroad, our fractured infrastructure drained by billions wasted.
Let’s mourn for all that’s been ruined, for all the lives lost and in those families let’s imagine the empty nights of a widow’s bed, the stolen futures of the soldiers blown to ribbons by a roadside bomb. All lost in the name of 9/11 from attacks that could and should have been prevented. And then fear was fanned to an inferno, greed overtook reason, and it seems like the keening for all that’s been destroyed can be heard from the farthest heavens.
And it all started with a bunch of extremists with box cutters?
Here is more of Kamiya’s analysis: “Like a vibration that causes a bridge to collapse, the 9/11 attacks exposed grave weaknesses in our nation's defenses, our national institutions and ultimately our national character. Many more Americans have now died in a needless war in Iraq than were killed in the terror attacks, and tens of thousands more grievously wounded. Billions of dollars have been wasted. America's moral authority, more precious than gold, has been tarnished by torture and lies and the erosion of our liberties. The world despises us to an unprecedented degree. An entire country has been wrecked. The Middle East is ready to explode. And the threat of terrorism, which the war was intended to remove, is much greater than it was.” The article can be found at www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/09/11/911
You might also want to check out my friend Tiana’s blog at http://tianatozer.wordpress.com/. She recently moved to Kuwait to work for Mercy Corps to establish a literacy project for Iraqi women and to help establish systems to ease the lives of disabled Iraqis. She’s been briefed by Mercy Corps about the real situation in the Middle East and reports these truths on her blog.
Posts
