Seven years after 9/11, still confusing…

(Copyright 2008)

The WALTHER REPORT

By Tony Walther

I suppose every generation has its moment or day that it never forgets. This is the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. at the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

For some, the never-forget day might be Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, or Nov. 22, 1963, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but for the younger adults, I guess the so-called “Generation X” and younger, and some of all ages, it is 9/11.

I quickly add, though, that in our current society, although everyone knows what 9/11 is, a large part of the populace is near oblivious to it all, nonetheless. Pearl Harbor took us into a World War, young men were drafted into the military and others (including women) signed up, and a great sacrifice was put upon the nation, citizens were called on not to just honor the dead at Pearl Harbor and then go shopping, but to help the war effort. Rationing was imposed (some got around it, but that is always the case in a society).

This time around we have imposed no sacrifice on ourselves outright, but we may well be sacrificing our future, in terms of monetary cost, broken lives, world relations. Although it is much talked and written about, it seems that the powers that be in Washington and even on Main Street don’t fully realize that the war is bankrupting our nation.

Yes, the polls say the war is unpopular, but I don’t know what that means. If the majority of the voters do not want us in the war, why are we in it seven years later? And if the war is difficult, but necessary, why would the majority of the public be against it? Or are they against the war or against the manner in which it is being prosecuted?

Actually, 9/11 and its aftermath is still a puzzle. It’s not simple, such as when Japan, a nation, clearly attacked us, and when it was the Axis partner of Germany, which was in the process of taking over Europe, attacking Great Britain, and eventually attacking the Soviet Union (which became our temporatry ally).

Details of 9/11 are still in question. We were not attacked head-on by another nation or even wholly recognizable group (although we now call it Al Queda). We have settled for the fact that Osama bin Laden, someone we once sponsored, masterminded the attack and that he does or has led a group called Al Queda. But we don’t really know how strong that group is and whether it is now centrally organized or decentralized, loosely held together with independent cells. We don’t even know if bin Laden is alive.

(And now I just heard on CNN that we are going into Pakistan with Special Forces teams without compromising our efforts by telling the Pakistanis who may well be passing on the info to our enemies, and I say it’s about time.)

We (at least we the private citizens) really don’t know who the enemy is, at least not entirely (although we hope our intelligence services have a handle on things, but they sure didn’t prior to 9/11 – or did they?).

We sometimes wish we could just control the whole world so we could keep things safe. We used to be secure (I was) in the fact that we were the world’s only remaining super power. To some extent we have found that such just makes up more vulnerable. We’re kind of like an elephant being harassed by mice. And when we go after Al Queda with all of our might sometimes it’s like going after a gnat with a sledge hammer.

And now in a crazy misstep we are stuck trying to build a new nation in Iraq and we are stuck in a quagmire in Afghanistan, with our military leaders warning we might not be able to win. And wasn’t Afghanistan the old Soviet Union’s version of Vietnam and did we forget the lessons of Vietnam?

And, I always have to remind myself to ask myself, what are we doing? Going after Osama bin Laden? No, the Bush administration publicly admitted to abandoning that idea (although I guess we are supposedly back to doing that now — very confusing).

Originally we went into Afghanistan because the Taliban leadership there was harboring bin Laden. But for some strange reason, perhaps only known in the minds of George W. Bush and his cronies, we all but abandoned the effort there and went full force into Iraq, at first ostensibly because they supposedly were developing or holding”weapons of mass destruction” (none found yet). It was all very confusing and today much of our populace thinks Iraq attacked us and we are fighting back.

And what about that invasion of Afghanistan? I have to admit, I and apparently most of the nation, felt that was the right and necessary move at the time.

But in your town, if there was a murder, and the murderer came from another town, would you call up the army and attack that other town and call in the air force and bomb it? Would you attack still another town because you had a suspicion someone there might be up to something evil? And are we fighting terror? We are creating terror along the way, if so. And how do you properly prosecute a war against a noun or a concept, “terror?”

Is it really just kind of a tacit acceptance among all of us that we are really going after the oil, but let’s don’t admit it? We’re not doing a very good job of it. Iraq has cut a deal for its oil with China and has cancelled some deals with western oil companies.

If the preceding seems kind of disjointed, it’s because 9/11 and its aftermath is confusing to say the least and this is only a blog, not a treatise on war and politics and history.

And do you recall where you were and what you were doing on 9/11?

I remember where I was when I heard the news of 9/11. In bed. I had taken a vacation from my job as a long-haul truck driver to be with my wife who was ill. I had been late at the hospital visiting her. When I was told that the World Trade Center in New York had been hit by an airplane I rolled over and went back to sleep. I got up in time to see the second tower hit (or was it not live, but a replay, I’m not sure). I watched the surreal pictures on television and as the news came out that the attack was perpetrated by foreign terrorists, I wondered, what now?

Well this is what now, where we are today, seven years later. More than 4,000 American combat deaths and thousands more terrible injuries and ruined lives and of course thousands and thousands of innocent and not innocent civilians in the Mid East killed and wounded. Just for perspective, we lost some 3,000 on 9/11. In the forgotten war in Afghanistan where things have heated up as of late, we’ve lost some 586 of our military personnel (I am not counting the relavtively small coalition contingent, but no disrespect intended).

I would not fault George W. Bush for his initial actions, but he has botched the whole thing since. It happens. People fail. I do wonder about his possible ulterior motives in it all. I’m not a conspiracy buff, but I am aware that some have suggested President Franklin Roosevelt saw the good side of Pearl Harbor being it made us get into a war he thought we, an isolationist-minded nation at the time, must be in. The Project for a New Century report, published prior to 9/11, a neocon blueprint for foreign policy, stated we needed another “Pearl Harbor” to convince the American public that we must establish our dominance in the Mid East. And 9/11 was apparently what its authors had in mind.

Even if we do have a degree of success, and after all of this, I would hope that we do, what have we really achieved? We will have to forever watch over (and finance) another part of the world. And if it was wrong in the first place to go into Iraq, how is it now right?

What we really ought to be doing is not nation building. We should be going after in whatever manner that is practicable those who wish to deal evil upon us. To some extent we are using clandestine efforts to do that very thing, I believe. In some cases, conventional military action may still be necessary.

 

But we need a fresh approach.

May God bless those who perished in 9/11 and their loved ones. And yes, despite my policy disagreements with our current administration, may God bless all of those who have agreed to serve their country in uniform and take orders as they must do. And I can’t forget the heroic deeds of the firemen and other public safety personnel and private citizens that day at the World Trade Center and Washington D.C. and on a flight over Pennsylvania (United Flight 93, on which passengers fought back against 9/11 terrorist hijackers, losing their lives but preventing another plane from hitting Washington, D.C.). May God bless us all. We’re going to need that blessing.

P.S. For those who are not familiar with my thinking, I am neither pro-war nor anti-war in general. I see war (in general) as possibly a necessary evil. But I abhor wars that have no clear purpose, no clear identification of what a victory would be, and fought for ever-changing and nebulous reasons, such is the case in Iraq (and to some extent Afghanistan).

Clarification:

In an originally posted draft of my previous blog, “Lipstick lies…” I left out a word, but corrected it in a second draft. Anyway, the phrase I was referring to was “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” In that original draft I forgot to put in the word “silk.”