Rare News Desk
Today, MSNBC broadcast their real-time reports from 13 years ago. It’s fascinating history, and media time capsule. It still packs a punch to the gut, even after two wars, and general post-modern cynicism about September 11.
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On the other hand, as Rare’s Douglas Barclay noted, it’s “war porn” in a way. For those of us who didn’t lose anyone, and who only have stories of school days interrupted, or staring in horror at the television, the footage of 9/11 is a reminder that it really happened. People who lost somebody don’t need to remember. Their lives without that person is all that they need. The national news of a snuff film doesn’t help with that.
Yet, no matter what the cable news airs today, the some 3,000 people who died on September 11 don’t get to rest easy. They were trotted out incessantly for the first few years after 9/11, then less and less often as time went on.
I want to the ninth anniversary memorial, during which oddly only First Lady Michelle Obama managed to remember that the people who died on Flight 93 were people who wanted to live their lives, not become American heroes.
If you are a victim of an American tragedy, you are deified with a particular lack of nuance. Blowback — not “our freedom” — caused 9/11. Nothing about U.S. foreign policy could justify the deaths, but they happened because of it all the same.
In response to 19 suicidal creeps punishing 3,000 innocent people for a beef with their government, that government went to war in two different countries. One, Iraq, had nothing at all to do with September 11. And now, less than three years after the last American combat troops left that battered nation, President Obama half-ass commits to more war to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
After 150 airstrikes since June, several hundred troops/advisers sent to the area, and a vague plan to get a better plan together later, it seems grimly inevitable that the U.S. will be back in Iraq for good. Killing journalists who were adults who knew the risks of working in warzones seems to be an act of war worthy of getting stuck in another pit of quicksand and alligators over.
Anything bad — and Lord knows, ISIS is bad — is an excuse to get back into doing what the U.S. cannot stop doing — messing about in other nations.
On September 10, President Obama reaffirmed his desire to avoid another boots on the ground war, but he also made vague, dramatic pronouncements about rooting out any terrorists who seek to harm the United States — in Syria and Iraq both. That’s the sort of vaguety that gave us an unending “war on terror” and the disastrously broad Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF).
And even if we avoid another ground war for another decade or so, isn’t this just going to be a Clinton-esque policy of bombing every once to keep resentment up? As more astute observers of foreign policy than I have noted, there was really just the one war in Iraq. It never ended.
In his speech, Obama provoked much scorn when he said that “ISIL is not Islam.” That is silly. They’re a radical, theocratic terrorist group who subscribes to a subset of Islam. To pretend that that isn’t so is dangerous. But to pretend that they are only creatures of religion is even worse.
Interventionists look at radical Islamists and pretend to know the entirety of their motivations. Naturally, if you believe in this version of Islam, you cannot also be motivated by the U.S. bombing and intervening all over the Muslim world.
This is just not true. Young, angry men can believe in a type of Jihad that will let them fly an airliner into a building in America. We can call them irrational and evil. We cannot pretend that these actions do not also have political motivations when they are screaming them at us. Osama Bin Laden made no secret of his hatred of the United States being based on its policies, including its support of Israel and its foreign bases in supposedly holy Muslim land.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky) is no peacenik. He seems to be okay with intervention against ISIS. Yet, even he admits that the U.S. helped create them. Overthrowing leaders – especially secular, stabilizing ones – bombing campaigns, and other arrogant movements has an effect.
Of course it does. After 100 years of Britain and the U.S. messing with the Middle East, the possibility of ever learning to be humble about what we can or cannot predict seems as far off as ever. Why is it to hard to admit that even people who despise us, and who are subscribers to a radical religion have real-world goals? And that they react to our actions, as we do to theirs?
Thirteen years after 9/11, the idea that the terrorists hated us for our freedom and nothing else has diminished a bit. But not on this day of mourning for the victims. And not when discussing how to handle the next Whack-a-Mole threat — the new group that hates us, and can only be tackled with another war.
If you state clearly that 9/11 happened because of U.S. foreign policy, there are plenty of war hawks still willing to pull a Rudy Giuliani and act as if that means you think September 11 was justified.
ISIS is awful. But they’re busy trying to establish their own state. There doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason to believe that ISIS is a direct threat to the United States homeland.
War hawks seem to believe that every single time you intervene, against ISIS or any other threat, you can scientifically predict the outcome and it will be just as you intended.
Never mind that enemy number one in the region was Bashar al-Assad last year, and the rebellious ISIS in 2014.
It is not going to be easy to pull back from abroad. Nor would that rid people of the motivation to harm the United States, simply because that wouldn’t erase old resentments. But at least it wouldn’t create new ones.
