A Crime against Ourselves

The attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Flight 93 were horrendous crimes. Nothing was supposed to be the same again. In reality, the potential impact should not have been financially, militarily or politically consequential. The impact became enormous only because we made it that way. We chose to turn a politically motivated crime into a system-threatening act of civilizational war, which it certainly was not. From there it has been all downhill and we have no one to blame but ourselves.

It wasn't that long ago, the 1990s leading up to 2000, that things were pretty good. Economically, the American economy was growing in size and efficiency, with a budget surplus and little or no inflation. Militarily, the Soviet Union and the Cold War had melted away; no military foe could threaten us. In foreign affairs, the European Union was completing its political unification and China was moving toward a market-oriented economy. Politically, the most serious problem seemed to be lying about sex. America stood as a colossus, the envy of the world.

Then came 9/11 and all bets were off. Ten years later we have depression-level unemployment, a "Long War," an intrusive national security state and the expectation that things will get worse with a further loss of civil, human and privacy rights. You can tell how bad it is from the politically muted commemoration of 9/11, especially the lack of self congratulation or the usual American triumphalism.

The conventional wisdom on the causes and consequences of the 9/11 attacks and these subsequent 10 years reflects the spin of those who were in charge and making some very bad decisions. The official line, as presented by the pundits and press, says that the president found his voice at the attack site and rallied a united America to face a forever changed and insecure world. The extremist Muslim terrorists were met firmly with a Global War on Terror. The president quickly and effectively carried the attack to the Al Qaeda haven in Afghanistan and by invading and occupying Iraq removed the possible threat of the use of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam Hussein.

The president told us that nothing was the same but that we could and should act as though it were the same and go shopping.

The actual narrative is something quite different. It is a different world after the 9/11 attacks because we chose to call those atrocities acts of war rather than crimes. We essentially militarized our response. We claimed the right to do whatever we thought appropriate to protect our national interest. We acted without any regard to the rules of warfare, the Geneva conventions or common sense. We set up the National Security State which gave us a permanent state of war or what the Bush administration hopefully called "The Long War." Those atrocities turned the world against us.

That "permanent state of war" became the excuse for everything. The invasion and occupation of Iraq may have cost us $3 trillion but we are going to eventually, and maybe even shortly, leave Iraq and the mess we made. But if Iraq is transitory, the Long war is not. America now has armed forces in almost a 100 countries and is fighting in a half-dozen wars (Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan) that we know of.

In the attempt to maintain normalcy in America, the response to 9/11 was outsourced to corporate America, the military-industrial complex. The response was privatized and offered to the highest bidder. Pres. Eisenhower warned us about the "acquisition of unwarranted influence" by the military-industrial complex. Terrorism replaced the communist menace to ensure that that influence continued and remained beyond political control. It is the reason we have a Long War. We now spend wastefully on security to the neglect of everything else. We can't afford schools, highways or public service but we can afford anything that supposedly heightens security. We have to feed the beast we have created with profits and the lives of the young and the poor.

In 10 years we have gone from an open, almost carefree society to a locked down, closed off community of shared fear. The security industry dominates our lives. We have to be screened by metal detectors before entering any public building. Every community has to have a black-hooded, armored SWAT team. At last count there were 1, 271 government organizations and 1, 931 private companies in the counterterrorism and intelligence community.

The legacy of 9/11 is that America gave up, to quote Benjamin Franklin, "essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety." We got neither. We have to end this war on ourselves and find a way, to use a post-World War I phrase, to "return to normalcy."