9/11 Changed Everything. And Nothing.

In the run-up to the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks Americans have been drowned with reminders of that fateful day. For over a week leading up to the anniversary USA Today ran a series of front-page stories entitled “How 9/11 Changed America.”

Americans have been told that they cannot forget 9/11. The implication is that Americans should not forget about the ghastly images from that day or how they felt. But this is a silly statement.

No can forget 9/11 because no one is allowed to. 9/11 is a part of daily American life. Anyone who flies in a US airport is reminded of the terrorist attacks. Take off your shoes. No liquids. Assume the position.

China-made American flags are still ubiquitous. The obligatory singing of “God Bless America” is as much a part of baseball games as arguing with the umpire and American soldiers are given public spectacles of reverence that are perhaps only outdone in their vacuity by parades in communist countries. Who could possibly forget?

Among the more unreflective clichés that emerged from the attacks was “9/11 Changed Everything.” This was government propaganda because terrorism was neither a new tactic of war nor was Islam a new religion. It reminds one of what Cicero said, "To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child."

A friend recently told me that he had asked his wife if she knew why the terrorist attack happened. She said she didn’t know and had never really thought about it. My friend was surprised but I wasn’t. It’s not that his wife is an ignoramus but most Americans haven’t thought about it. Nor have they been encouraged to do so.

Not a few days after the attack did President Bush get out in front and declare this wasn’t “our” fault and that the terrorists only hate us for our freedoms. He admonished the American people not to dwell upon it. He said, Don’t worry. We who failed so spectacularly on 9/11 will take care of everything. As for you, go shopping. It was an explanation so simplistic and convenient that it shouldn’t have worked on third graders but the American people obeyed without question.

The eventual execution of Osama bin Laden crystallized the so-called post-9/11 world. When the news of bin Laden’s death came, people in the streets and in sports stadiums chanted “U-S-A! U-S-A!” But what were they celebrating? The war wasn’t over. Troops weren’t coming home any sooner than scheduled. The one behind the attacks was dead but everything remained exactly the same. What does it say when the death of Public Enemy #1 amounts to nothing?

When Navy SEAL Team 6 got bin Laden they took pictures which were not released and they buried the body quickly. In retrospect, it’s almost like the death never happened.

In May, I theorized that the burial happened that way so the national security state could continue as before with few questions asked. In what should have been an ideal time to consider dismantling at least parts of the national security bureaucracy, the speedy burial meant the resumption of “normalcy” regarding the post-9/11 world. No one asked, Why, if all it took was a unit of well-trained soldiers to track down bin Laden, were large armies stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq? Indeed, things would go on as before.

That is the legacy of September 11, 2001.

Everything changed and nothing changed.

When Osama bin Laden was found hiding in plain sight in Pakistan and there were zero consequences for Pakistan's duplicity, that should have exposed once and for all the sham of what Washington has done in the so-called post-9/11 world.

With apologies to country music singer Darryl Worley, no, we have not forgotten. If only we could.

Fighting Them Over There So We Can Fight Them . . . Over Here?

Fortunately for New Yorkers, Faisal Shahzad’s plan went up in smoke.

It’s been less than a week since Shahzad entered the national scene with his smoking car in Times Square, but there remain unanswered questions, including one no one wants to ask.

Why would he do this? What were his connections to the Pakistani Taliban? And if this had happened two years ago would Dick Cheney view this attempted terrorist attack by a native Pakistani as justification for invading Iran?

There remains plenty of ambiguity in this case, but one of the certainties is that Shahzad did not fit into our government’s tidy box of terrorist classification.

In the midst of a contentious immigration debate taking place in this country, Shahzad fits the positive stereotype the elites like to project on us for why there should be unrestricted immigration.

Shahzad never hurt anybody. He seemed to have gone about the immigration process in the prescribed way and was awarded citizenship 13 months ago. He went to American universities where he did not cause any trouble. He had his Muslim faith but he must have appeared moderate since nobody was startled by it.

He earned a job as a financial consultant for a marketing firm in Connecticut. He bought a house that was foreclosed a year ago, making his loss in the housing collapse the only probable reason that his economic situation would have given him cause to lash out at his adopted country.

But does anyone believe that Faisal Shahzad, a thirty-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen born in Pakistan, who earned degrees from American universities in 2000 and 2005, and was a junior financial analyst until one year ago, would have tried to ignite his Nissan Pathfinder were the United States not bombing his native land, an act of undeclared war that was escalated during the past year by President Obama?

All the available evidence in this case points in that direction.

Fighting the terrorists “over there” certainly did not stop Shahzad from trying to fight us over here. The U.S. has been engaged in Afghanistan for nearly nine years and in Iraq for over seven now. He had plenty of opportunity to volunteer for jihad because of those wars while he was enjoying freedom and becoming naturalized. Once drone strikes in Pakistan became more pronounced, this native-born Pakistani decided to take a trip to the old country where, it is assumed at this point, he volunteered himself for the Pakistani Taliban late in 2009.

If this scenario is true, that Shahzad was trying to exact revenge for what was happening to his old country, then wouldn’t extrication from the region remove the incentive for these continual, albeit amateurish bomb plots?

What the U.S. government has to realize is that terrorism is also a home-grown problem. While the Bush administration was trying to hypnotize the country into believing that terrorists are motivated by an inexplicable hatred of freedom, traditionalist conservatives and libertarians pointed out that Americans suffer terrorism over here because we have been over there.

As long as we insist that we have to be “over there,” terrorists will come over here. As Shahzad shows, some of them are already here.

If we see that it is “necessary” to remain “over there,” the price of our presence will be more car bombs like the one set by Faisal Shahzad.

And if some of those are successful, will it occur to anyone in seats of power that fighting them “over there” did not stop them from coming over here?

*

Editorial note: Wes Messamore of The Humble Libertarian has brought me on as a new regular contributor where this essay also appears. Please feel free to read and comment there as well.

An Opportunity only Conservatives Can Miss

Only a year into the Obama presidency and Republicans are poised to make gains in 2010. This is heartening news for a party that was pronounced dead only a year ago.

With President Obama’s poll numbers slipping, 30-year Senator Chris Dodd choosing retirement over electoral humiliation and with the Tea Party Movement not going away, the Republicans smell enough blood in the water to already entertain dreams of regaining the majority. Maybe 2009 wasn’t so awful for the GOP after all.

For all of the rhetorical improvements Republicans have made in the wilderness, the party is proving that they can still take conservatives for another wild ride.

The Tea Parties, after Obama’s inauguration, were probably the biggest force in American politics last year.

Demonstrations on Tax Day were passionate, very well attended, and Tea Partiers made perpetual turn-coat Arlen Specter sweat through more than just the heat during the August recess. Talk of constitutional fidelity is up and tolerance for big government is down.

With such a force as the Tea Parties even outpolling the favorability of Republicans, limited government conservatives might finally have reason to hope for their cause. Since the Tea Parties could be such a force, maybe the Republicans can be trusted this time to responsibly administer the levers of power and actually cut spending, take their noses out of Americans’ private lives and balance the budget.

Then came the Christmas bomber.

All the hope for reducing spending and cutting government may still be lost.

While the vigor and passion exerted against Obama’s intrusive administration is laudable, the conservatives who make up the Tea Party Movement still have another hurdle to climb for theirs to be a serious limited government movement.

The deficit will not be reduced, the dollar will not be strengthened, and tax increases will not become an afterthought if ObamaCare is the only big government swindle that is eliminated. The limited government patriots of the Tea Parties will do only half their job if the issue of military spending is ignored. And that is why the Christmas bomber may be secretly celebrated by a Republican Party establishment that would not think twice about pulling another heist on their limited government conservatives.

If the Republican Party can continue justifying excessive military spending once they are back in power, the bait will be in for them to continue the domestic spending that made George W. Bush the LBJ of the Republicans.

That’s why this may be the perfect opportunity for conservatives to discover that fulfilling their mission of limiting government is incomplete unless military spending is addressed.

It’s been common among conservatives, during and since the Cold War, that any suggestion of reducing spending on the military is tantamount to surrender or appeasement of the enemy. But conservatives don’t believe this way about all the other types of government spending.

When a bleeding heart liberal pleas that there needs to be more money allocated for education, health care or poverty reduction, rank-and-file conservatives have usually responded that the more money that gets applied to those programs, the worse the problem gets. American children haven’t gotten smarter because money was given to them by the federal government and health care costs have simply increased as the government has involved itself. The same skepticism needs to apply to defense spending.

Even with President Obama allegedly “gutting our military,” the U.S. still spends as much on defense than the rest of the world combined. Should we ever ask ourselves how the rest of the world expects to be safe when they don’t spend nearly as much as we do? Is it possible for us to get by with less?

This also highlights the gravest contradiction in modern American conservatism. The mantra has always been to cut spending and cut taxes but there can be no contemplation of limiting the spending that could be given to the military.

This is a time to ask whether it’s in the national security interests of the U.S. to have troops in 130 countries of the world.

This is a time to ask whether the government, through both Republican and Democratic administrations, has exploited the patriotism of Americans by scaring them into acquiescing to their imperial ambitions.

This is a time to ask whether the maxim that more spending does not guarantee better results should also be applied to the military, a government institution.

This is a time to ask whether the network of terrorists responsible for 9/11, now down to perhaps 100, is worth hundreds of thousands of American troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and perhaps Pakistan or Yemen, or whether there might be a more fiscally prudent solution.

This is the challenge conservatives of the Tea Parties must overcome to retake their party.

The War Drums Beat On

President Barack Obama was elected last November to bring change to America’s governing establishment and end our senseless foreign wars.

However, Clinton administration retreads populate the Obama administration through and through. There has been no scaling back of the intrusive and controversial government measures the Bush administration enacted such as the Patriot Act or FISA, no less spending, and no less transparency in government. Altogether, the scope of the Obama administration looks remarkably similar to the Bush administration.

The one area where it was suggested that there might be a change is the one area where we see the most consistency: foreign policy.

Despite all the best efforts of the Republican Party hacks and talk radio bobbleheads in 2008, Barack Obama is not an isolationist, not willing to “surrender” in the “War on Terror” and perfectly willing to use the American military with the same aloofness as his predecessor.

Take, for example, President Obama’s pledge to remove American combat troops from Iraq by August 2010. That pledge comes with a caveat: 50,000 are staying. This is not the same as American generals staying in Saigon until the Communists were breaking down the door. This is no residual force.

If as many as 50,000 American troops are staying in Iraq to train the local army and police forces, then they will inevitably be called upon to continue fighting all of the warring elements in Iraq. If post-2010 Iraq descends into rampant violence again, what is to stop President Obama from sending more American troops back to Iraq? By keeping one foot in the door, he leaves open the probability that he will have to bring the other one back in as well. It is not as though American troops are leaving the region.

And what exactly is the withdrawal plan for this “residual force” of 50,000 troops? If the plan is for the end of 2011, why keep such a large force there? If I was a cynical guy, I would say that just keeping them there re-opens the possibility that we could be in Iraq for 100 years. What then, would be the difference between President Obama’s plan with these 50,000 troops and John McCain’s plan that would keep some form of military presence in Iraq for 100 years if that’s what it took?

Now let us look at President Obama’s Afghanistan plan. In what could have been as many as 30,000 additional troops, the president settled on sending 17,000 to the graveyard of empires beginning sometime this month.

This plan calls for 17,000 troops, many of whom have already served in Iraq or were trained for duty in Iraq, only to shift them to a completely different theater. Afghanistan, a place probably worse than Iraq, is isolated and highly tribal, whereas Iraq was fairly centralized and comparably united. The military has already acknowledged that Iraq tactics which these soldiers were already trained for will be obsolete in Afghanistan due to the latter's hazardous terrain. Do we have time, in a war about to enter its 8th year, to wage a war by trial-and-error? What will be the reaction of the American people when hundreds of Americans are photographed in flag-draped coffins this year?

And how will the American people react when embattled Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who faces a difficult election this year, might be tempted to cut a deal with a rejuvenated Taliban that controls at least as much of Afghanistan as he does, in order to consolidate power? What will President Obama do then? How will they react when hundreds of young Americans lose their lives for a nation that no longer houses Osama bin Laden but are instead stuck in another inescapable nation-building venture?

If Secretary of War Robert Gates is correct and there is "no military solution for Afghanistan," then why is our military still in Afghanistan?

This does not even cover the drums that are beating for war with Iran. Everyday there is another "new revelation" about Iran’s capability to build the bomb. Everyday there is a new scare tactic employed by the government and the media to convince the American people that there is a nuclear bomb being secretly built in Iran with their name on it. Everyday we are told that our way of life could end in any instant, at the hands of a figurehead in Iran who has no control and barely any support in his own bankrupt country.

Couple all of that with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who as a presidential candidate threatened war on Iran over the security of Israel, is now saying that diplomacy is not likely to work on Iran. What does it mean when the nation’s top diplomat says diplomacy is not expected to work? It’s not that diplomacy might not work on Iran, it’s that it is not even being considered.

Did we really learn nothing from the Iraq debacle? How many "news reports" were we subjected to that Saddam Hussein was behind the anthrax attacks, the 9/11 terrorist attacks or the next nuclear attack?

Hussein at least had weapons of mass destruction in the past, which made the pre-war claims plausible. Ahmadinejad has no weapons, no military, and losing support in his own country. A mountain has been made that they have the capability to launch a satellite. And after all that happened in Iraq, shouldn’t at least an ounce of skepticism be permitted before marching off to war on the drop of a hat?

We have wars that won’t end in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have a war being prepared for in us in Iran, we are firing missiles into Pakistan supposedly intended for Osama bin Laden that kill as many civilians as suspected terrorists.

Considering all the military quagmires, all the negative capital around the world generated from our escapades, the military budget that contributes to the bankrupting of this country, and the fact that bin Laden is still at large, tell me this, what have our military excursions actually done for America?

And what of any of this makes President Obama antiwar?

Iranian Pipsqueaks

On occasion, this blog has taken intellectual swipes and partisan shots at Mr. Clifford May, the director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a neoconservative think tank whose main objective seems to be drumming up an imaginary threat that the country of Iran poses not only to the West but the whole world. That is the topic of Mr. May’s essay for January 29, which readers may read for themselves here, while I take it upon myself to address his points.

In this particular bromide, Cliff May rambles about how terrible it is that the Iranian Revolution can celebrate its 30th anniversary this year. While that may not be something worth celebrating for anyone in our hemisphere, May’s piece is worth reading because in his rationale, one can find all the reasons for exactly why there does not need to be a war with Iran.

First, May cannot stop talking about the dangers the Iranian regime presents to the West, i.e. Israel and the United States. But his article begins by reminding the readers that it has been 30 years since the U.S.-installed shah was deposed. Why, in 30 years of supposed wrangling with the U.S., have they made zero verifiable or substantial threats toward us (hostages held in their country and one mention by a figurehead president with no army, air force, or nuclear weapons, of wiping the United States off the map do not count as real threats)? 30 years of avoiding war with a supposed enemy is a success that borders on the Cold War success of not fighting Soviet Russia if one wants my opinion.

Next, the author attempts to drum up fear in the reader by telling them that the revolutionary leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, wanted to install a Muslim heaven-on-earth by organizing a jihad against the West because of their power, laws, freedoms, and decadence. The call went nowhere. Once the reviled shah was gone, there was nothing left to keep the revolutionary factions together and so, the jihad could not get off the ground.

Mr. May cites Iran’s proxies Hezbollah, Syria, and Hamas as evidence that the regime is dangerous. He obviously regards their financial banking of Hezbollah and Hamas as proof that they cannot be tolerated. Yet, both of those terrorist organization are fundamentally weak.

Israel, in 2006 in their war in Lebanon and their recent war in Gaza, utterly blew their opponents away. In the recent conflict, Israel inflicted casualties over 100-to-1 and in spite of that, we are supposed to believe that Iran is an existential threat. If that is what we are told is an “existential threat,” then we certainly have nothing to worry about regarding Iran’s ability to be a menace outside its own borders. Israel was the big military winner in both conflicts.

Then a staple of Mr. May’s writings comes forth: unless something is done (war, anyone?) then Iran will be able to attempt a genocide or nuclear attack on Israel. (On a brief tangent: another staple of May’s is that questioning the wisdom of these foreign ventures is irrational because if we don’t do what we’re doing now, then there won’t be journalists or historians in the future to second-guess these decision. Note the last line of his December 18, 2008 piece).

For Clifford May, a genocide is always right around the corner and unless something is done, poor, weak, little Israel will be facing its own existential threat. Well, in the cases of Lebanon and Gaza, Iran can provide only a paltry little sum of money to support their causes. What makes anyone think that a country without an air force or army can mount any sort of concerted attack on a country with a fast military in Israel with overwhelming firepower, as we have seen. He is right that Iran has a very few number of missiles, but that capability has been proven to be overblown.

But Clifford May stays on message right until the very end. His whole article leads up to advice for the new president who himself is sounding a lot like the old one on how the world “cannot allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon. . . . And I will do everything that’s required to prevent it.” It is Mr. May’s advice that there needs to be a war in Iran. No, he does not come out and say those exact words, but he says that the new administration “still has time to limit its final death toll.”

If the war and occupation of Iraq proves anything, it is that even more deaths can result through a well-intentioned occupation than from the original regime that was deemed to evil to be allowed to exist. So he admits that yes, the regime in Iran is terrible, but military action would stop those deaths. News flash: Even more people die when there is military action, Clifford.

Also evident in the “there is still time” line is his presentation to us of a ticking time bomb scenario. Iran is fast on its way to having a nuclear bomb, he clamors. This alone is suspect. Approximations range from the National Intelligence Estimate which declared that Iran abandoned its nuclear program in 2003 but for people who want more rationale for war with the destitute nation, there are places like the International Institute for Strategic Studies that claims Iran could have the bomb by the end of this year.

There are still too many unknowns to make a case for war, but Clifford May and his ilk are determined to get another war.

In addition to preventing them from obtaining a nuclear weapon (which, at the very least, means intervening in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation, something we would certainly object to), Mr. May encourages President Obama to make good on his desire to place an embargo on incoming oil to Iran as well as telling the new president to tell the Iranian people that their rulers are the reason for their misery. I may be some crazy, right-wing, antiwar loon, but I have a hunch that if an embargo is placed on an already starving Third World nation, it will only empower the rulers, especially when the people know for certain that some of their misery can be traced back to the Americans.

And there you have a brief commentary and dissection of the writing of Clifford May: neoconservative, warmonger, and rouser.

There are a lot of items of America’s foreign policy plate right now: working on a way to get out of Iraq sooner than 2011, the doubling of the number of American troops in Afghanistan, and launching air strikes into Pakistan. If we wish to avoid another unnecessary war, step number one should involve identifying countries that have made actual threats or strikes at us and ignoring people like Clifford May.