My first indication that our country was not responding well to the 9/11 attacks came when Bill Maher was fired from ABC for questioning whether ‘cowards’ was an apt description for people who willingly fly jet airliners into buildings. I didn’t remember the History Channel ever describing kamikaze pilots as lacking courage. If anything, they had a disturbing (inhuman) lack of fear. In fact, the suicidal mission is more effective in demoralizing the enemy than it is in creating damage (most of the time). The jihadist fighters have a saying that they ‘love death more than we love life,” or variations on that theme. When an enemy demonstrates that level of commitment, it can be very intimidating.
What disturbed me about the firing of Bill Maher was that it was an early sign that our country did not want to know why we had been attacked. It seemed that people feared that learning the reasons might lend some kind of justification to the deaths of our citizens, our families, our coworkers. To even discuss the reasons was to besmirch the memory of the dead and call into question their innocence. Therefore, the hijackers were ‘cowards’ who ‘hated our freedoms.’ They were waging a nihilistic war to the death with us, and there was no point in trying to understand their motivations, let alone in trying to reason or negotiate with them. The president saw a replay of Flight 175 flying into the South Tower and declared, “We’re at war.”
But, with whom? How many of them were still alive? What were their capabilities and intentions? Did they have any demands? The first answer we got was an estimate of how many souls had passed through Afghani training camps over the years. It was estimated that perhaps as many as 100,000 people had been trained there, and all of them were now presumed to be potential suicide attackers. It didn’t matter that most of them had been trained to fight on one side of the Afghan Civil War, or to go to Kashmir or Chechnya or China’s Uighur Province. It didn’t matter that few of them were game for suicide missions. We were not making a sober-eyed assessment of the threat we faced.
Perhaps because the government and the media refused to entertain the idea that the hijackers were human beings with actual motives, the American people ran out in droves and bought Korans and books on Islam and the Middle East. We sought to answer for ourselves the question the establishment refused to provide. It turned out that the answer was easy to find on the internet. Usama bin-Laden had issued fatwas in 1996 and 1998 that laid out the reasons for killing American civilians in response to our nation’s foreign policies. He never mentioned hating our freedoms.
Bin Laden wanted to make a spectacular attack on American soil because attacks on our embassies and warships had failed to get American citizens to question their country’s foreign policy. In this sense, learning about our foreign policy and questioning it was in some sense reacting exactly as bin-Laden intended us to react. That only added to our reluctance to respond rationally to the attacks. Wasn’t changing our policy vis-a-vis Saudi Arabia exactly what he wanted us to do? Well, we better not do that, then.
With the lawyer for the five 9/11 plotters warning that they will plead not-guilty in order to explain to the American people how and why they carried out the attacks, a good part of the country is going to react with revulsion. Why give these assholes a platform to criticize America and try to justify what they did? Insofar as any of their arguments make a modicum of sense (even in a totally perverted way), won’t that bring dishonor upon our country and the victims of 9/11?
Ultimately, the answer is no. Whatever the faults of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East prior to 9/11, they didn’t justify murdering nearly 3,000 innocent civilians. That those policies were unpopular enough to put our civilians at risk was something we needed to confront and address. Where those policies were justified, we needed to take steps to protect ourselves from the blowback. Where those policies were unjustified, we needed to make changes. What we didn’t need to do was expend trillions of dollars making things worse. But a failure of leadership, imagination, and rationality led us to do precisely that.
It will be healthy for us to learn from the 9/11 plotters why and how they did what they did. I think we’ll learn a lot from it that we haven’t allowed ourselves to learn in any other way. And, that, is a worthy way to honor our dead.
