I wasn’t going to write much more about 9/11, but then Obama wrote that no act of terror could ever change America.
I don’t know if that’s true. If it is, it means America was already a terrible, terrible place.
The funny thing about 9/11 is that it worked. Bin Laden had a plan, his plan was to draw Americans in and show they could be beaten.
He thought they’d be beaten in Afghanistan. They weren’t–they were beaten in Iraq. When the US left Iraq it had to pay the various militias off to avoid attack.
That’s losing.
Meanwhile there are al-Qaeda affiliates over much of Asia and Africa. Al-Qaeda central may be weaker, but al-Qaeda the idea is far far stronger than it was before 9/11.
Saddam was a secular Muslim. He was one of bin Laden’s enemies, and the US destroyed him.
Meanwhile, at home, the US destroyed its own freedoms. It tortured people.
The US also instigated a worldwide assassination program, killing whoever it wanted, wherever it wanted, on the authority of the President.
The US has always been pretty shitty when dealing with others: supporting coups versus democratic governments, sponsoring death squads, looking the other way when its pet governments and terrorists raped, tortured, and murdered. (Pinochet had dogs trained to rape women; he was very approved of by Washington.)
Bill Clinton, of course, had killed about half a million Iraq children with his sanctions, and Madeleine Albright, a truly evil woman who is burning in Hell today if there is one (I doubt it) stated she thought it was “worth it.”
But after 9/11, the US went even further. Torture, from the top, by its own soldiers, as opposed to merely winked at. Widespread assassination. The gutting of habeas corpus. Probably a million more dead Iraqis. Later, under Obama, the destruction of Libya, another war crime. (He should hang, as Nazis hung, along with Blair, Cameron and Bush. Most Nazis were hung not for the Holocaust but for attacking a country which had not attacked them.)
American crimes, of course, are endless. All empires’ crimes are endless, and so are all colonial states’ crimes. This is true of both America and Canada, as they moved West, and it is true today of Israel.
Still, something important changed after 9/11. Lines were crossed.
Americans who are okay with all the crimes should be aghast as well, not that lines were crossed (they have no lines) but that they were crossed so incompetently. The US got its ass kicked by a bunch of rag tag militias. The myth of US military supremacy lay shattered. The US can still bomb anyone into dust, but everyone now knows that its military can do nothing but destroy.
Bin Laden was the first great man of the 21st century. Great is not a synonym for good. From a position of infinite weakness, he made his enemy use its own strength to accomplish his goals.
The US proved itself not just evil (don’t even, there are too many dead), but stunningly incompetent and crippled by corruption.
And today, Democrats are rehabilitating George Bush, the war criminal, to attack Trump.
Trump may yet do far worse than Bush, but until he’s started a major war, he hasn’t, and even if he does, Bush was–and is–evil and should be in a war crimes dock, along with most other major American politicians of the time, almost all of whom voted to give Bush the vast powers he used exactly as any fool could have predicted he would.
9/11 either changed the US, or revealed the US. Either way, the US after 9/11 was ghastly and evil.
And in 2004, knowing all the evil Bush had done, Americans re-elected him, thus showing that enough of them approved of what he had done. Cavil all you want about vote suppression and so on, it is not as if there was a huge tide of Americans who said “not in my name.”
This is still George Bush’s America, and his America is bin Laden’s America. Bin Laden was right about the US. He knew exactly what the US was, knew how to push its buttons and America did what bin Laden wanted to.
Bin Laden was a profoundly evil man, and he recognized the US’s profound evil and used that evil to his benefit.
Understand clearly, there were choices: Iraq did not have to be invaded; Afghanistan did not have to be occupied (a punitive expedition would have been sufficient); the Patriot Act did not have to be passed; torture in Guantanamo did not have to occur; routine drone assassination was not necessary.
All of these were affirmative choices, and virtually all of them were reconfirmed in 2004, then in 2008, because Obama continued almost everything Bush did, and even ramped some of it up, like drone assassination and deportations.
Bin Laden won because he was right that the US was evil, or perhaps, that with a push, it was willing to be even more evil.
Hell of a thing.
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