As the spectacularly failed reign of Bush the Younger drew to a close a scant two and a half years ago, he and his few remaining supporters clung to a particularly telling delusion. Among record low approval ratings and two huge rejections at the ballot box, they’d mutter to themselves that history would be kind to him. All the way to the top his hard liners maintained that he wasn’t unpopular because of his crimes and failures, but because he’d been dealt a shitty hand. They said that anyone would’ve struggled after the disastrous autumn of 2001, that no President could’ve prevented Katrina from hitting New Orleans, that – to use an old cliche – nobody could’ve predicted that Hussein had no weapons, that supply side doesn’t work, and that the housing bubble was doomed to burst.
Charitably that line of thinking was – and is – deluded; realistically it’s a continuation of the obstinate wishfulness that pervaded the government right from the black day he took over from Slick Willie. The bedrock problem of the entire eight years, so perfectly captured when they literally dismissed “reality”, was a devout fundamentalism in the face of anything and everything. Budgetary collapse only showed the need for more tax cuts. Unprecedented international revulsion was an indicator of the strength of America’s leadership. Bank failures not seen since the 1930s meant regulations had strangled capitalism. A mountain of corpses in the Terror Wars meant only that the policy is succeeding. They were true believers, and neither the grandest failures nor harshest falls will ever stop them from walking backwards.
That unshakable foolishness is the greatest of the many untold stories of that foul year 2001. Hijacked planes and powdered letters didn’t break the world, didn’t even break the United States. Their awesome impact shrinks to historical illegibility next to the unprecedented might and awesome decency of America. However imperfect in practice, a country two centuries dedicated to the best ideals humanity has yet produced could easily absorb even those spectacular blows. But the true believers thought otherwise. They didn’t see a recoverable tragedy, they saw a millenarian affirmation.
The greater tragedy, the one that has killed far more Americans than 2001’s foreign criminals, is that their fervency did not blind them to opportunity. While the bodies were warm and the fires still smoldered they declared war on the bogeyman. They took a figure who hardly deserved a footnote in our annals and raised around him a fearsome countenance. Reinforced like that, terror took the public’s mind, and likely many of their own. Panic became normal, and anything short of hysteria treasonous.
In their certainty they applied the grand, sprawling concept of war to a couple of bad ideas and a few lightly armed assholes. That war then spread into every nook and cranny of our society, and we are vastly worse off for it. We treat ourselves and others with unprecedented amounts of suspicion and hostility, not just because something bad happened, but because our leaders made it far worse than it needed to be.
Ten years on and we are still bleeding from the insanity they unleashed upon us and the world. No mere moment of silence can adequately mourn those lost years. No reflection, however solemn or cynical, can even operate on the same scale as all that has been wasted and broken. And today’s pageantry cannot conceal the continuing harm of the war Bush the Younger and his fanatics chose to start, and that his successor has chosen to continue. Ten years from now a different person will occupy that office, and if we’re to have any chance of rebuilding what was torn down, there is one thing that must be done: end the war. Until that happens, all memorials will be incomplete, all speeches will ring hollow, and the mourning will never be finished.
