September 11, 2001:
What We Have Learned
an editorial
There was of course a lot of musing this week about what we have learned over the past year from the horrible events of September 11, 2001. The obvious answer seems to have escaped the public commentators, though.
The obvious answer is that we have learned nothing. For example, after a year we still do not know what the point of the atrocity was.
Of course, many are willing to speculate. Speculation is a field in which September 11, 2001, produced tremendous growth. Just this week we Canadians were treated to our prime minister's speculation that the murders of over 3,000 people were based on a belief that the West is greedy and arrogant.
Of course, Mr. Chrétien did not explain how, if that were true, the murderers turned out to be citizens of some of the richest nations on Earth. Most of them were Saudis, and Saudi Arabia is not known for the hesitation its citizens display in acquiring or displaying wealth or power. The supposed mastermind of the murders is a bllionaire. If these people were upset about supposed Western greed and arrogance, you'd think they'd find a more appropriate response to be spreading some of that Saudi wealth around the poorer nations of the earth, thereby demonstrating the superiority of non-Western culture. Murdering people who are poorer than the people in your country is a poor way to protest against greed.
And we still do not know how the highjackers took over the planes, although it does appear that the earlier stories of them using only utility knives and cardboard boxes to control large numbers of passengers were probably not true. However, no one seems to care any more about how the highjackings were accomplished. The most popular idea these days is that we'll just blow up some evil people and our problems will be over.
We are in fact still afraid of even discussing why the murders occurred. This week Canadian commentators condemned the majority of their fellow citizens who opined in a survey that American policy had been responsible for the attacks. No matter that similar percentages of Americans have said the same thing in surveys, no matter that in some sense American policy almost certainly had something to do with provoking the attacks, and no matter that saying American policy is responsible for something is not equivalent to condemning it, the purveyors of public opinion were aghast. They were not aghast, of course, at the utter banality of these opinions but at the idea that people might think that anything other than the most crudely conceived moral considerations were responsible for these atrocities.
The received opinion among the chattering classes these days is that the murders were the product of evil, so if we just destroy the evil people our problems will be over. First off the West helped defeat the Taliban. The product of that attack on evil is an Afghanistan without a stable government, or a democratic one. While the supporters of the war crow about how predictions that the United States would get bogged down in Afghanistan were wrong, the United States nevertheless clearly is bogged down in Afghanistan. It is not bogged down in a war, to be sure, but that could change at any moment.
And now the idea is to bomb Saddam Hussein. Unlike many opponents of the war, we here at NIH do not believe that defeating Saddam Hussein would be all that difficult. However, we fail to see how defeating him solves the problems of which we should have become aware on September 11, 2001.
The chief problem is that we are vulnerable to terror attacks of terrifying scope and viciousness. Little has been done to prevent another attack happening. Missile launchers were deployed around Washington, D. C., of course, on September 11, 2002, but missile launchers do not stop truck bombs or any other of the alternatives to aerial suicide attacks open to the depraved sorts from whose ranks sprang the murderers of September 11, 2001. They also do not stop aerial suicide attacks outside Washington.
Throughout history the human race has found thinking about things to be too difficult for it. It has preferred to take the quick and easy course of assigning the blame for problems to certain individuals and then punishing those individuals. Poverty is considered to be the fault of welfare bums, so people are kicked off welfare. Ill health is considered to be the fault of smokers, so smokers are denied health care. September 11, 2001, is considered to be the product of a cabal of evil world leaders, so we will punish those leaders.
Desirable as the removal of North Korea's repulsive regime is, removing it would not protect us against attacks like those of September 11. The argument that getting rid of the most evil people will end evil forever is similar to an argument that executing mass murderers will end murder forever. The difference, of course, is that we have tried acting on the second argument, and we have found that it is erroneous.
The governments of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea could have been toppled ten years ago without appreciably reducing the chances that the murders of September 11 would happen. We can topple them now and still we will not reduce the possibility of further mass murders happening. In fact, there are plenty of people around with no connection whatever to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea who will commit mass murder as soon as they get the chance. Timothy McVeigh was not taking orders from Saddam Hussein.
The immediate need after September 11 was to improve security and intelligence. What we have seen instead is a system of alerts whose announcement seems never to coincide with any attacks. Much more effort has been put into justifying military adventurism in the Middle East.
The atrocities of September 11, 2001, occurred because we did not try to prevent them. They occurred because people responsible for the public safety did not discharge their duties. They occurred because our leaders failed to predict the consequences of massive military, economic, and political intervention in foreign countries.
Since September 11, instead of trying to remedy these deficiencies we have instead taken the easy route of making ourselves feel good by beating up on someone much smaller than ourselves (and many who opposed that beating had merely decided instead to blame the evil Yankees). We have spent a lot of time thinking about our moral superiority to the evil people of the world – whether you think Saddam Hussein is evil or that Geroge W, Bush is, the motivation is much the same and the opinion has about as much utility. We have failed to engage in any real debate about what September 11, 2001 means, preferring instead to think about how we ourselves personally are on the side of the angels. In other words, we were clueless before September 11, 2001, and we have chosen to remain clueless since. Atrocities like those of September 11 will happen again, and we will have let them.
September 13, 2002
September 11, 2001: What We Have Learned © Coolth, 2002
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