On the fifth anniversary of 9-11

The President’s speech to the nation on the fifth anniversary of 9-11 omitted a few pertinent facts about the war in Iraq in the context of the war on terror. 

          In 2001, we were attacked by twenty men with box cutters.  Possessing no technology of their own they used some of ours against us in a heinous and unprovoked attack.  In what can best be termed a fluke success they killed 3,000 innocent Americans along with themselves.  They were connected to a ragtag and discredited group in exile from their own countries called al Qaeda.  At the time of the attack it would be exaggeration to say that this group comprised more than 100 committed followers worldwide. 

To contain them and destroy them and bring their leaders to justice should not have been difficult to achieve.  Even a semi-competent government through simple law enforcement, modest diplomacy and timely military action should have been able to do this.  As it happens we are the richest and most powerful nation on the planet with the greatest military and with the rest of the world more than willing to stand behind us to bring these people to justice.

Yet after five years the ringleaders of al Qaeda who organized the attack have still not been caught.  At the same time our administration has parlayed an attack by twenty unarmed men into two full scale and open-ended wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and approved of another by proxy in Lebanon.  None of these wars can be called a victory according to the administration’s own definition of victory.  Yet they have lost tens of thousands of lives and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. 

The centrifuge to all these errors is the war in Iraq.  Through an irresponsible misrepresentation of intelligence they led us into an unjustifiable attack on an unarmed nation.  Then by carelessly conflating many competing elements of the greater Islamic world they have succeeded in uniting virtually all of them against us.

Now al Qaeda members and sympathizers number in the many thousands and it is growing.  We have become the most unpopular nation in the world with few friends willing to support us.  We have placed ourselves at war in fact or rhetorically against literally millions of Muslims over a dozen countries. 

In the beginning, Osama bin Laden opined 9-11 to be the opening salvo of a world wide religious war against the west.  At the time, George Bush rightly claimed it wasn’t.  Since then he has adopted the language of our enemies and has become the chief convert to the Osama bin Laden school of world history.  He loudly takes every opportunity to call Iraq the centerpiece of a world wide religious war to transform Islam – exactly what bin Laden said it was and precisely the war we were trying to avoid.  Since when does the United States take its foreign policy cues from a fanatic, megalomaniacal sociopath who lives in a hole in the ground?

And yet George W. Bush looks out upon this policy landscape of unprecedented chaos, carnage, overreaction, confusion, misjudgment and failure and calls it good.  He and his vice-president say it’s going well, we’re winning, and they would do everything exactly the same way again.  They couldn’t be more wrong.