9/11: Over the Horizon

 

The final act of the U.S. war in Afghanistan was a drone strike in Kabul that killed 10 people. Our latest investigation shows how a man the military saw as an "imminent threat" and "ISIS facilitator" was actually an aid worker returning to his family: https://t.co/eUX5WSImrD

— Evan Hill (@evanhill) September 10, 2021

There just isn't anything more apt to round out our 20 year misadventure in the War on Terror, than by this--a misguided drone strike that showed how far we had come, that we could be wrong from farther away instead of having to be wrong face to face and street by street. 

The memorial of 9/11 has been fraught for some time with me because of the cant and formulaic expressions of remembrance and the truisms that just strike me as false. "We came together that day." Tell it to visibly brown Muslim or Central Asian people who experienced discrimination, and find a kernel of what people came together to be. We needed to be unified to move forward, but we didn't need to do all we moved forward to do. 

The 9/11 fallen, those who died that day, and also their survivors, and the ones who have died of assorted toxins breathed in from working near or on the pile since and their survivors--they deserve every respect and support. But they were also used to sell an open-ended global war that was misguided in many ways. These ill-conceived decisions, occurring in part because short-sighted people didn't want to know any better and acted on what felt "right" politically, did more harm than good.  

Over time, my respect for those victims made me genuinely question how we remembered it. The Bush Administration capitalized on our fears and desire for vengeance so easily. Over the years, seeing the response to the early intelligence regarding potential attacks on the US homeland as a kind of "let it happen on purpose" stopped seeming like such a conspiracy theory to me--and seeing the politicization of Covid-19 and the hundreds of thousands of American bodies it has wasted has only made me more certain, that there are politicians who really could stomach any number of dead Americans to accomplish political goals.  

And I can't really lionize them if by chance they say the right and necessary thing at intervals as if their souls could be laundered by a moment of good will. They've drawn a deficit there that can't be so easily paid back. And there are people who haven't made a peep lately (and best not, even if their spawn does) who know very well by now that it is better to stay silent who were paid for their participation. And never really answered for what they did. The penalty for demonstrating that corruption walks is that a society becomes more corrupt. Dirt can't wash itself. 

And the date itself has been used by gross manipulators to demonize, not the terrorists who committed the acts of violence against us that day, but political scapegoats of a certain stripe, from Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and Dinesh D'Souza, to Glenn Beck and his Tea party nonsense, and the promoters of the the coincidence of the date of the Benghazi attack (and why was the storyline about the weird rightwing anti-Islamic video dropped so hard, and denied so vehemently by the right wing, I still wonder?) The so-called shared national tragedy (or tragedies) that hit at all of the US as a nation was adopted by the right as their tragedy and a cudgel for supposedly less-patriotic liberals.  

I talked about the Through-line last year, and how it quickened (although it by no means created) the xenophobia that led to Trump. But to give Bush a little credit for his speech at Schwenksville, what occurred on 1/6 was in the same foul spirit as what happened on 9/11, except these barbarians came closer to the gates. Trump's fan club was in the cockpit. The Capitol police were trying, and eventually succeeded, in rescuing this Flight 93 attacking our capitol. We are every bit as grateful to them as to those first responders who kept going in on 9/11, doing their difficult and necessary job of serving and protecting. 

But there has to be a vision of 9/11 over the horizon, and it doesn't refer to our misbegotten faith in technocratic military solutions that still devolve on death and bad intelligence. The past is an escape room. We have to deal with it very directly and step by step. The problems we face are closer than we think and worse than we want to know.