I think the 9/11 attacks damaged us all. I think we’re all walking around with emotional scar tissue. And even those who were not directly affected were wounded by the way this country chose to respond. A friend of mine reacted to the news that bin-Laden is dead by saying, “Great, can I have my decade back?” That might seem like a flip response, but think about it. What if?
What if we hadn’t invaded Afghanistan? What if we hadn’t invaded Iraq? What if, instead, we just did what Leon Panetta and President Obama did yesterday? We hunted down bin-Laden in a foreign country, sent in special forces, and terminated him. What do you think it cost us to plan for and carry out that mission? How much “collateral damage” did it cause?
While such an action would have (and is) getting a certain degree of criticism, no one could argue that it is worse than what we did instead. I think a lot of progressives are so damaged from the way the hunt for bin-Laden was turned into a War on Terror in which they were cast as enemy-sympathizers, that they are having a hard time feeling good about bin-Laden’s demise. After all, the war was quickly politicized. Karl Rove made sure of that. And there was much more trauma to come. We saw our country fabricate a case for war (and, yes, I do not believe that is too strong), engage in torture, set up a system of indefinite detention, completely ignore and eviscerate our 4th-Amendment privacy rights, and divert massive amounts of resources to a new national security state replete with unaccountable contractors, a new cabinet department for security, a new intelligence agency and director, new hassles at our airports, new passport requirements at our borders, and so on.
How much of this was necessary? How much of it was moral defensible?
While the 9/11 attacks certainly made plain that we needed to reexamine the status quo in the Middle East, we didn’t really make an honest effort at doing that. We did manage to quietly move our Air Force from Saudi Arabia to Qatar. That addressed one of the 9/11 hijackers’ main motivations for attacking us. But, other than that, we didn’t do much to lessen anti-American feelings in the region. Instead, we did a lot to increase it by invading Iraq and then letting it fall to pieces.
I think we’re making some uneven progress now. Helping to push Hosni Mubarak out the door was a definite turnabout for U.S. foreign policy. Our relationship with Mubarak was why Mohammed Atta was motivated to be the ring-leader for the 19 hijackers. We should have examined our relationship with Egypt before events forced the choice on us.
Of course, the situation in the Palestinian Territories in another component of this, as is our continuing relationship with the House of Saud. I can’t say we’ve made any progress in either area.
I’m very happy that we finally dealt with Usama bin-Laden. But I’m also sad that we got so far off track and committed so many moral errors and wasted and misused so many resources in the decade it took us to find him. We are going to be stuck with that legacy and all these problems for quite some time. I wonder what Dwight Eisenhower would have to say to us about the national security state we’ve erected. How do we ever get rid of it?
