Equal and Opposite Reactions
“Dad is taking this in a less than heroic fashion.” - Lisa Simpson
Yesterday saw a lot of memorials, moments of silence and, “What does it all mean six years later” type articles. Today, the anniversary of the day after the attacks, deserves some reflection as well. Even though most of us didn’t know anyone killed six years ago it was right and proper for us to mourn the dead yesterday; the September 11th attacks were a national trauma and deserve to be remembered. But the world we live in now, and the world we will be living in five, ten, twenty years in the future is more important than memorials and our future depends more on the twelfth than the eleventh.
The great tragedy of this hapless and wasteful Administration will probably be the war in Iraq, with all the embarrassments of the, ahem, war on terror (torture, illegal surveillance, suborning everything to politics) thrown in for good measure. Of equal importance is the utter destruction of the spirit of September 12th. I am by no means the first person to point this out, but it is so easily lost and forgotten amid the daily carnival of political bullshit that it merits mention under almost any circumstances.
Our initial reaction to the attacks of that terrible Tuesday (and the anthrax attacks of the subsequent months) was one of resolve and unity. It wasn’t just us either; countries around the globe stood with us and offered us all but unconditional support. Most famously epitomized by the headline in Le Monde, “Nous Sommes Tous Américains” it may have been the greatest moment of global solidarity ever.
It was pissed away so quickly and thoroughly that six years later we can barely remember it. The chest thumping nationalist rhetoric that made up the campaign for war on Iraq (”old Europe”, “freedom fries”, Americans are from Mars Europeans are from Venus, etc) trashed it and the invasion, a scant eighteen months after the attacks, finished it once and for all. A moment of national and global unity like that could never be expected to last, people being people we were bound to go back to squabbling sooner or later, but it’s utter destruction was unnecessary and tragic.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that what Republicans used to say about us not being a global cop is true. There are not enough American spies, analysts or troops to police the world and while there is a certain macho attraction to the idea that is better to be feared than liked, if we lack the will and strength to be the former we’d better work our asses off at being the latter. Failing at both, as we have done the last six years, is unconscionable.
Domestically we can see the destruction the Administration has wrought front and center in the form of the Congressional testimony of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker. On a day we should be united in remembering the victims of the greatest mass murder in American history our memorials are tainted overtly by politics and charges of dishonor from both sides. It’s nothing new, but that doesn’t make it any less regrettable.
