Mantra for 9/11
Fourteen Years Later, Improbable World
By Tom Engelhardt
September 08, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "TomDispatch"
- Fourteen years later and do you even
believe it? Did we actually live it? Are we still living it? And how
improbable is that?
Fourteen years of wars, interventions,
assassinations, torture, kidnappings, black sites, the growth of the
American national security state to monumental proportions, and the
spread of Islamic extremism across much of the Greater Middle East
and Africa. Fourteen years of astronomical expense, bombing
campaigns galore, and a military-first foreign policy of
repeated defeats, disappointments, and disasters. Fourteen years
of a
culture of fear in America, of endless alarms and warnings, as
well as dire predictions of terrorist attacks. Fourteen years of the
burial of American democracy (or rather its recreation as a
billionaire’s playground and a source of spectacle and entertainment
but not governance). Fourteen years of the spread of secrecy, the
classification of every document in sight, the
fierce prosecution of whistleblowers, and a
faith-based urge to keep Americans “secure” by leaving them in
the dark about what their government is doing. Fourteen years of the
demobilization of the citizenry. Fourteen years of the rise of
the
warrior corporation, the transformation of war and intelligence
gathering into profit-making activities, and the flocking of
countless private contractors to the Pentagon, the
NSA, the
CIA, and too many
other parts of the national security state to keep track of.
Fourteen years of our wars coming home in the form of
PTSD, the
militarization of the police, and the spread of war-zone
technology like
drones and
stingrays to the “homeland.” Fourteen years of that un-American
word “homeland.” Fourteen years of the expansion of surveillance of
every kind and of the development of a
global surveillance system whose reach -- from
foreign leaders to tribal groups in the
backlands of the planet -- would have stunned those running the
totalitarian states of the twentieth century. Fourteen years of the
financial starvation of America’s
infrastructure and still
not a single mile of high-speed rail built anywhere in the
country. Fourteen years in which to launch Afghan War 2.0, Iraq Wars
2.0 and 3.0, and Syria War 1.0. Fourteen years, that is, of the
improbable made probable.
Fourteen years later, thanks a heap, Osama bin
Laden. With a
small number of supporters,
$400,000-$500,000, and 19 suicidal hijackers, most of them
Saudis, you pulled off a geopolitical magic trick of the first
order. Think of it as
wizardry from the theater of darkness. In the process, you did
“change everything” or at least enough of everything to matter. Or
rather, you goaded us into doing what you had neither the resources
nor the ability to do. So let’s give credit where it’s due.
Psychologically speaking, the 9/11 attacks represented precision
targeting of a kind American leaders would only dream of in the
years to follow. I have no idea how, but you clearly understood us
so much better than we understood you or, for that matter,
ourselves. You knew just which buttons of ours to push so that we
would essentially carry out the rest of your plan for you. While you
sat back and waited in Abbottabad, we followed the blueprints for
your dreams and desires as if you had planned it and, in the
process, made the world a significantly different (and significantly
grimmer) place.
Fourteen years later, we don’t even grasp what we
did.
Fourteen years later, the improbability of it all
still staggers the imagination, starting with those
vast shards of the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan, the
real-world equivalent of the
Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand in the original
Planet of the Apes. With lower Manhattan still burning and the
air acrid with destruction, they seemed like evidence of a culture
that had undergone its own apocalyptic moment and come out the other
side unrecognizably transformed. To believe the
coverage of the time, Americans had experienced Pearl Harbor
and Hiroshima combined. We were planet Earth's ultimate
victims and downtown New York was “Ground Zero,” a phrase previously
reserved for places where nuclear explosions had occurred. We were
instantly the world’s greatest victim and greatest
survivor, and it was taken for granted that the world’s most
fulfilling sense of revenge would be ours. 9/11 came to be seen as
an assault on everything innocent and good and triumphant about us,
the ultimate they-hate-our-freedoms moment and, Osama, it worked.
You spooked this country into 14 years of giving any dumb or
horrifying act or idea or law or intrusion into our lives or
curtailment of our rights a get-out-of-jail-free pass. You loosed
not just your dogs of war, but ours, which was exactly what you
needed to bring chaos to the Muslim world.
Fourteen years later, let me remind you of just
how totally improbable 9/11 was and how ragingly clueless we all
were on that day. George W. Bush (and cohorts) couldn’t even take it
in when, on August 6, 2001, the president was given a daily
intelligence briefing
titled “Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.” The
NSA, the
CIA, and the FBI, which had many of the pieces of the bin Laden
puzzle in their hands, still couldn’t imagine it. And believe me,
even when it was happening, I could hardly grasp it. I was doing
exercises in my bedroom with the TV going when I first heard the
news of a plane hitting the World Trade Center and saw the initial
shots of a smoking tower. And I remember my immediate thought: just
like the B-25 that
almost took out the Empire State Building back in 1945.
Terrorists bringing down the World Trade Center? Please. Al-Qaeda?
You must be kidding. Later, when two planes had struck in New York
and another had taken out part of the Pentagon, and it was obvious
that it wasn’t an accident, I had an even more ludicrous thought.
It occurred to me that the unexpected vulnerability of Americans
living in a land largely protected from the chaos so much of the
world experiences might open us up to the pain of others in a new
way. Dream on. All it opened us up to was bringing pain to others.
Fourteen years later, don’t you still find it
improbable that George W. Bush and company used those murderous acts
and the
nearly 3,000 resulting deaths as an excuse to try to make the
world theirs? It took them no time at all to decide to launch a
“Global War on Terror” in
up to 60 countries. It took them next to no time to begin
dreaming of the establishment of a future Pax Americana in
the Middle East, followed by the sort of global imperium that had
previously been conjured up only by cackling bad guys in James Bond
films. Don’t you find it strange, looking back, just how quickly
9/11 set their brains aflame? Don’t you find it curious that the
Bush administration’s top officials were quite so
infatuated by the U.S. military? Doesn’t it still strike you as
odd that they had such blind faith in that military's supposedly
limitless powers to do essentially anything and be “the greatest
force
for human liberation the world has ever known”? Don’t you still
find it eerie that, amid the wreckage of the Pentagon, the
initial orders our secretary of defense gave his aides were to
come up with plans for striking Iraq, even though he was already
convinced that al-Qaeda had launched the attack? ("'Go massive,' an
aide’s notes quote him as saying. 'Sweep it all up. Things related
and not.'") Don’t you think “and not” sums up the era to come?
Don’t you find it curious that, in the rubble of those towers, plans
not just to pay Osama bin Laden back, but to turn Afghanistan, Iraq,
and possibly
Iran -- “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go
to Tehran” -- into American protectorates were already being
imagined?
Fourteen years later, how probable was it that the
country then universally considered the planet’s “sole superpower,”
openly challenged only by tiny numbers of jihadist extremists, with
a military better funded than the next
10 to
13 forces combined (most of whom were allies anyway), and whose
technological skills were, as they say, to die for would win
no wars, defeat no enemies, and successfully complete no
occupations? What were the odds? If, on September 12, 2001,
someone had given you half-reasonable odds on a U.S. military
winning streak in the Greater Middle East, don’t tell me you
wouldn’t have slapped some money on the table.
Fourteen years later, don’t you find it improbable
that the U.S. military has been unable to extricate itself from Iraq
and Afghanistan, its two major wars of this century, despite having
officially
left one of those countries in 2011 (only to
head back again in the late summer of 2014) and having endlessly
announced the conclusion of its operations in the other (only to
ratchet them
up again)?
Fourteen years later, don’t you find it improbable
that Washington’s post-9/11 policies in the Middle East
helped lead to the establishment of the Islamic State’s
“caliphate” in parts of fractured Iraq and Syria and to a movement
of almost unparalleled extremism that has successfully “franchised”
itself out from
Libya to
Nigeria to
Afghanistan? If, on September 12, 2001, you had predicted such a
possibility, who wouldn’t have thought you mad?
Fourteen years later, don’t you find it improbable
that the U.S. has gone into the business of robotic assassination
big time; that (despite Watergate-era
legal prohibitions on such acts), we are now the Terminators of
Planet Earth, not its
John Connors; that the president is openly and proudly an
assassin-in-chief with his own global “kill
list”; that we have endlessly targeted the backlands of the
planet with our (Grim) Reaper and Predator (thank you
Hollywood!) drones armed with Hellfire missiles; and that
Washington has regularly knocked off
women and
children while searching for militant leaders and their
generic followers? And don’t you find it odd that all of this
has been done in the name of wiping out the terrorists and their
movements, despite the fact that wherever our drones strike, those
movements seem to
gain in strength and power?
Fourteen years later, don’t you find it improbable
that our “war on terror” has so regularly devolved into a war of and
for terror; that our methods, including the targeted killings of
numerous
leaders and “lieutenants” of militant groups have
visibly promoted, not blunted, the spread of Islamic extremism;
and that, despite this, Washington has generally not recalibrated
its actions in any meaningful way?
Fourteen years later, isn’t it possible to think
of 9/11 as a mass grave into which significant aspects of American
life as we knew it have been shoveled? Of course, the changes that
came, especially those reinforcing the most oppressive aspects of
state power, didn’t arrive out of the blue like those hijacked
planes. Who, after all, could dismiss the size and power of the
national security state and the military-industrial complex before
those 19 men with box cutters arrived on the scene? Who could deny
that, packed into the Patriot Act (passed largely
unread by Congress in October 2001) was a
wish list of pre-9/11
law enforcement and right-wing hobbyhorses? Who could deny that
the top officials of the Bush administration and their neocon
supporters had
long been thinking about how to leverage “U.S. military
supremacy” into a Pax Americana-style new world order or
that they had been dreaming of “a new Pearl Harbor” which might
speed up the process? It was, however, only thanks to Osama bin
Laden, that they -- and we -- were shuttled into the most improbable
of all centuries, the twenty-first.
Fourteen years later, the 9/11 attacks and the
thousands of innocents killed represent international criminality
and immorality of the first order. On that, Americans are clear,
but -- most improbable of all -- no one in Washington has yet taken
the slightest responsibility for blowing a hole through the Middle
East, loosing mayhem across significant swathes of the planet, or
helping release the forces that would create the first true
terrorist state of modern history; nor has anyone in any official
capacity taken responsibility for creating the conditions that led
to the deaths of
hundreds of thousands, possibly a
million or more people, turned
many in the Greater Middle East into internal or external
refugees, destroyed nations, and brought unbelievable pain to
countless human beings. In these years, no act -- not of torture,
nor murder, nor the illegal offshore imprisonment of
innocent people, nor death delivered from the air or the ground,
nor the slaughter of
wedding parties, nor the killing of children -- has blunted the
sense among Americans that we live in an “exceptional”
and “indispensable”
country of staggering goodness and innocence.
Fourteen years later, how improbable is that?
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the
American Empire Project and the author of The
United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War,
The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation
Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is
Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security
State in a Single-Superpower World.
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Copyright 2015 Tom Engelhardt