Most Americans still don't get it

``Why?'' question still not examined, looks in the mirror not on the agenda

This is an extreme example, but I think it shows us something about the far-too-common jingoism branch of the American intellectual class and how they understand 9/11:

Remember 9-11 without denial
By Jon Reisman

I watched the attacks on the World Trade Center on a perfect blue September morning five years ago. As I watched the world change with my two young sons I thought that I didn't want to be at war. I really wanted to deny the reality of that awful day and its consequences. Apparently many of my fellow citizens feel the same way. Denial may ultimately bring peace through appeasement and defeat, but I can't recommend it....

Riesman, identified as a faculty member at the University of Maine at Machias, goes on to paint essentially the Rums-Chen-Bushian image of an epic global struggle against the mad, ruthless force of ``Islamo-fascist" killers from a ``pool of 12,000 homicide bombers''.

Why? They do it for glory--``certain cultures are apparently glorifying such actions'' and that is ``disturbing.''

For how long will the war continue? Until there is ``peace'':

Peace will come when we either win or lose the war. At the moment we're losing, but we'd be in greater peril if we had accepted the 2001 status quo in the Middle East. If we want peace either the three large Persian Gulf regimes must change, or Israel must cease to exist. One Persian Gulf regime has been replaced, and another is developing nuclear weapons and flouting the United Nations. Either that regime will succeed, eradicate Israel and win the war, or they will not.

And Israel is the linchpin of Middle East righteousness. When Israel disappears under (I guess) Iran's mushroom cloud, it'll be the end of ``America, capitalism and freedom.''

Never mind Israel's advanced nuclear armaments pointed all over the Arab & Persian world? No threat there?

Over the last week or so, a media drumbeat of 9/11 5-yr anniversary programs sought answers to the question, ``Are we more secure?'' Every answer came from a point of view similar to Mr. Reisman's.

I went to a forum yesterday where my friend Doug, a philosophy professor and academic with a more serious analysis, made an observation I have found quite compelling: ``Only a very small percentage of our insecurity has anything to do with terrorists flying planes into buildings. We need to deepen and expand our notions of security....People flying planes into the World Trade Center, or suicide bombers, those are real concerns. But what I’d like to suggest is these are less than one percent of the real concerns about insecurity in the world that are not being addressed.''

The list of unaddressed security issues are very familiar to those of us not fortunate enough to belong to the upper classes: lack of jobs, the health care crisis, school decay, soaring energy prices.

Meanwhile, the United State continues to lead a Terror War steeped in false premises and manipulation of intelligence. The consequences of the US invasion of Iraq has visited the equivalent of one 9/11 per month on the Iraqis, as the Iraqi people have suffered untold detention, torture, and death at the hands of the Americans.

Yes, the post 9/11 Terror war started up whole new programs of attempted US domination around the world. But it is funny to listen to administration officials make the ridiculous argument that 9/11 could not be about US policy because Iraq had not yet been invaded at that time. These arguments presume that history itself started on 9/11/2001. Here is a quote from Vice President Cheney from a couple of weeks ago,

I know some have suggested that by liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein, we simply stirred up a hornet's nest. They overlook a fundamental fact: We were not in Iraq on September 11th, 2001, and the terrorists hit us anyway. As President Bush has said, the hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse.

In fact there was history before 9/11. Rarely were US actions purely beneficent. The savagery of American policy over the last few decades hardly can be underestimated.

Here is how Guardian writer Seamus Milne put it in a September 13, 2001 comment:

Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world....

As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George Bush's father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.

Now President Bush wants us to believe his utterly failed war that has destroyed Iraq is some kind of global line in the ``struggle between tyranny and freedom'' where ``the worst mistake'' would be to ``pull out'' because the terrorists we have attracted to Iraq ``will follow us'' home.

Mr. Bush then says, ``The safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad.'' He may be right, but he has it backwards. Then only victory possible at this point is a Pyrrhic victory where possibly decades of struggle against American domination by Iraqi resistance and their supporters will be the only thing that follows.

It's turned out just like I wrote the week before the invasion:

US taking of Iraq will increase, not lessen, the chance of terrorism against Americans....Bush is in the process of whipping up such strong anti-American sentiment throughout the world that pathetically weak Iraq is near the back of the line of potential attackers who will remain angry for a long, long time. In the run-up to the attack, the terrorism threat is being played like an accordion with the flood of alerts and news of bin Laden tapes and al-Qa'ida connections to Hussein. Listen to the din carefully and you will hear the dissonance: Powell tells the U.N about al-Qa'ida in Iraq, but there are disclaimers on the terror alerts that want to direct us away from thinking there is a link to the coming war....Unfortunately, the anger generated by this approach will leave America the target of terror for years to come.

...An extended, dangerous period of escalation of application of U.S. power in an attempt to hold and control its expanding spoils of war can be expected. Despite their arrogance and hubris, Bush and his team should not have much confidence that the chaos of the post-invasion period can be kept benign. There is great uncertainty about the controllability of forces that could be unleashed as America commits to new global management requirements far beyond its present substantial deployments. Current U.S. planning envisions a three-phase transition of Iraq from American military administration to some form of American-style government led by current Iraqi exiles. This process will be highly problematic and will probably require considerable force to pacify the disparate populations within Iraq. Beyond Iraq, the U.S. intends to insure that the behavior of Saudi Arabia and other countries with strategic resources align with its hegemonic goals, thus inviting a radical anti-american response.

It really didn't take a genius to see this then, nor does it take one to see where all this is still heading right now.

I suppose this has been the genius of the Bush regime. They have taken an extreme demonstration of vulnerability in the technological age--``Nineteen men attacked us with a barbarity unequaled in our history''--and turned that into an ``offensive in a war unlike any we have fought before.''

But the Terror War is a failure. The ``offensive'' sweeps up mostly the innocent. Americans still don't get it. Provoking people around the world against by killing their kin while we wallow in our victimhood is hardly going to protect us. Our attention to the real question of why someone would want to hurt us is lost.

Five years ago this week I wrote this about justice for 9/11:

Naturally, our first reaction is that we want those responsible punished. And they should be punished. But I have a great deal of fear that the U.S. will retaliate, blindly, with actions that would put us on the same disgusting moral level of terrorism of the hijackers. If we as a generous, free, peace-loving people, want justice, there should be justice, not just vengeance. This is no time for blind patriotism that could become the justification for the killing of innocents in the manner of the hijackers. Justice must be calm and measured in a fair Court of Law. Justice must involve not only punishment of perpetrators, but also an examination of the conditions giving those perpetrators the passions they possess lest such attacks will happen again. We must ask and answer fully—Why?

What President Bush and his administration have done, the multiple 9/11s they have inflicted upon others, unfortunately has come to pass with far too little resistance at home. We won't be safe until we can take a good hard look in the mirror and act on to correct the moral failings that we would see.