I remember the day. It was weird. I went to junior high school back then, I think I was in 7th or 8th grade... At home, my father had the TV on aljazeera and he kept repeating "bin Laden finally got you, you maniacs", while his face mirrored the horror he was watching on TV, and knowing fully what that meant for everyone. The next day at school everyone was talking about it in class, and everyone was EXTATIC. Celebrating. I remember that some discussions broke out about it where some students were arguing that the attack killed civilians, but many were quick to counter that many many more civilians were killed by the USA all over the middle East and that this was the only way to do anything against the military power that is the US. In case you didn't realize, virtually everyone in the middle East hates the USA, and usually has a valid reason why to. I didn't know what to think. I understood both arguments. And even though it is obvious what was right and wrong and that terrorist attacks should never be supported, I still struggled in taking a stance. Once I made up my mind though, I kept my opinion to myself. Because loudly speaking out against the attacks was an act of treason. While reading the article, it struck me how the same 12% in the states that were against the war in Afghanistan (and were called traitors), are probably the parallel group to the ones in the middle East who did not support the attacks and were also seen as traitors. That day, hatred won. Everyone knew what was coming. The wrath of the almighty would thunder down onto the whole middle east for decades. The results of which we see today. What did it bring? More hatred. More trauma. More generations of hatred. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if we would rather have the "traitors" on both sides in positions of power instead of the "warriors" and "heros".
I'm sure I've told the story here multiple times before, but I was on a layover in Amsterdam on Sept 11. I'd been working in Cape Town, South Africa for a month, had a one-day layover in Amsterdam where my fiancee and two business partners met me for a business meeting with a Dutch produce supplier, and then was to return home to Budapest on Sept 12. The four of us had finished our meeting with the produce company and were headed back to the city when we heard about it. We got back to the place we were staying in plenty of time to experience the second plane. All airlines shut down for 24 hours, and then national air carriers were allowed to return home with any local passengers they could carry. Fortunately, my trip from Amsterdam to Budapest was on the Hungarian Malev airline, so my fiancee and I could return home to Budapest. The outpouring of love and genuine affection I got from everyone (including the 'emotionless' Dutch) was incredible. People crying. Expressing their love for America. Hugging me. Looking deep into my eyes and really connecting, and meaning what they were saying. This was the one time in America's history where we could have literally changed the entire fucking planet. If America had welcomed the support of all the nations of the world, let THEM pursue the perpetrators, and if we had taken the moral high ground... the entire world would be a different place today, with America - the idealized, righteous, generous, embracing type of America - finally embracing the principles upon which this nation was founded. Instead, we decided to cover it all up to protect our Saudi friends. I have roughly 30-40 years left on this planet. Which gives me about 10 Presidencies. If we go back 10 Presidents we land in the Nixon/Kennedy era. Soon after I pass at the ripe old age of 85, or so, I suspect this 100 year period will be taught in schools as the decline of the United States of America. Ending with the break up into the loose "EU-like" coalition of smaller countries that occupy this continent in the 2050-2060 timeframe.
It's sort of the same thing, and I don't see it often anymore, but "Support The Troops" was weaponized to squash dissent with war. I was in the Army National Guard from 1998-2004. I never deployed, but not one person with a Support The Troops magnet (it was never a sticker) on their car cared one bit about me. Supporting the troops was meant to mean cheering as men and women are sent into war.
Yeppers. Watched it happen August 1990. Military even copped to it - they didn't want us "spitting on the troops" "like we did after Vietnam." When it was pointed out that there were no documented instances of troops ever being spat upon, there was silence. When it was pointed out that it was generally protestors who were shot over Vietnam, there was more silence. But first they called up the Reserves. All of them. Podunk units that did fuckall were activated so that everyone everywhere knew "someone" in Desert Shield, even if they weren't doing more than sweeping the office at the reserve center. Then they "embedded" the troops. Which every news organization clutched their pearls over but did it anyway. There would be no reporting from the front lines that wasn't being done from Bradley IFVs. Then they did the prime time push. Nothing but grainy black'n'white footage of Maverick missiles hitting buildings. By the time troops actually rolled we might as well have been the Red Army. Buddy of mine actually tried to organize a protest march. Got all of five people. All five got death threats, and rednecks throwing things from cars. And that was before we had a resolution from the Security Council. Pentagon had noticed that all the Heartbreak Ridges in the world weren't properly indoctrinating the empire. People were getting the message "war is a bummer" from songs like "Born in the USA" and "Walkin' on a Thin Line" and movies like Platoon and Hamburger Hill so the minute Iraq was on the agenda, shit went full Riefenstahl. And it's been there ever since.
I remember reading this David Foster Wallace article when it first came out (2007). His thought experiment was that America should not respond with rage, and instead the right approach was to view the victims of 911 as "democratic martyrs" as Wallace puts it. Over the years his sentiment has returned to me several times, usually when I take my shoes off in an airport. Of course it is also an impossible response for a country to accept. Were the 88/12% split in the opposite direction, which it would need to be to be accepted; my guess is that the 12% would burn the country down in their grief and anger. --- One thing that I am constantly amazed by is the "They hate us because of our freedom!" sentiment. I mean do people really think that some dude in Afghanistan hates a country 3K miles away because of their political system? I'd say its far more likely the fact that his grandmother was blown to bits by a drone strike is the root cause don't ya think. Or in other words, they might have good reason to hate.
The Bush administration made a fateful choice to pursue 9/11 as an act of war, rather than as a crime. The 20 years since have been a direct consequence of this action. Had the United States pursued bin Laden as a criminal, the Taliban would have given him up to the Hague. There would have been a trial. The United States would have been the sympathetic victim. Of course, in The People vs. Osama bin Laden, the defense would have brought to light bin Laden's work for the CIA with the mujahedin, his inroads with the Saudi royal family and the general skullduggery of American foreign policy. A Gore administration would have happily sacrificed the CIA's South Asia program on the altar of geopolitics. There would have been a reckoning, there would have been outrage on the right, but the world would have ended up a closer, more tight-knit place. The consequences of empire would have been held up for all to see and the price of hegemony discussed ad nauseum by all sides. But Bush's dad was the head of the CIA, Cheney and Rumsfeld were black bag scumbags going way back, and tying a Reichstag fire to the Project for a New American Century was an opportunity the neocons couldn't miss. Results were predictable. Those of us with any insight into foreign policy saw this coming a mile away; I personally didn't think we'd be in Afghanistan for 20 years but 5-10 was inevitable.
I've argued to many people, almost entirely unsuccessfully, that W was a worse president than Trump. For all his bluster and missteps, the lasting policy consequences of the Trump administration are mostly containable. The Afghan war to a certain extent and the Iraq War to a major extent are foreign policy fuckups that have been producing results for two decades with no end in sight. He paints now. Great. He is friends with Michelle Obama. Cool. He fucked our country worse than any president since Hoover. Awesome.
W was a more competent president than Trump, and that's scary. We're talking about a man who confused Sweden and Switzerland. His administration allowed the neocons to change the world to suit their fantasies. However, you're now arguing that the neoconservative view is worse than the neoliberal view, and that's tricky. Here's the thing, though. Reagan fucked shit up worse than W. As far as the Republicans are concerned, he's a greater president than Teddy Roosevelt.
Same journalist wrote this: Want to make it up? Get a job. I'm not picky about this. I would never demean someone for honest work. Starbucks is hiring. Thing is, they demean others, calling them "bootlickers." Your problem last November was she had a Patreon. This is in Rolling Stone. So now your problem is she tweeted "it's time to forget 9/11"? After writing an article for Rolling Stone explaining exactly why? And look. I know "low-effort snark" is your way of relating to the world. And i know that you fart about squirting low-effort snark into your tightie whities to see if anybody recoils at the stink and then changing your underwear to do it again if they don't. And I know that eventually you've pissed off so many people with your low-effort snark that you have to run and hide until enough people forget the low-effort snark to wait for something insightful to come out of your mouth but - you were kind of five? In 2001? - And Canadian? - And sure as shit weren't designing mosques and airports with Pakistani colleagues? Like some of us? - And definitely didn't sign up for two tours in Afghanistan because of it like the author So I'm going to tell you this: The reason there's no middle in politics is because we get it from both fucking sides. Here you are, shitting a Michelle Malkin-grade purity test into a discussion about the harmfulness of purity tests. And you're doing it to score points, and you're doing it because you're lazy, and you're doing it because maybe someone somewhere will pat your little head for salivating when the bell rings. And I really shouldn't give a fuck because you don't care, nobody you know cares, you were indoctrinated into this whole macrocosm some of us have been trying to elbow back into Pandora's Box since September 12 and you know that "burn the witch" is always a safe thing to shout from the back of the crowd but if I can get you to listen to one tiny thing before you fuck off back to your spider hole to lick your wounds and wonder anew why you don't have any friends, it's this: If you LISTEN when you don't have anything to say, you might LEARN SOMETHING. But if you SHOUT INTO THE VOID all you'll do is chase away anybody who might actually have a clue. I had lunch with a rep, sometime between September 13 2001 (when my girlfriend of 4 1/2 years left me) and September 18 2001 (when the first anthrax attacks happened). And we're sitting out on the terrace eating clam chowder and he says "the dumb thing is bin Laden totally won. This is exactly what he wanted - all of us freaking out, lashing out against anyone else and clamping down on liberty." Never saw his ass again; dude was fired a week later, probably for being part of that 12 percent vocally rather than silently. Week after that we're all holding our breath while we're opening our mail; week after that my buddy Mohammed told me he couldn't run at lunch anymore because the longshoremen were spitting on him and yelling "go home sand ni__er". Your tax dollars didn't pay nearly as much to kill a half million Afghans and Iraqis as mine did, and not just because I've been paying taxes since before you were born. I'll bet you don't know anybody who worked on Guantanamo Bay for the US Attorney. Dollars to donuts you've never been friends with anyone who ended up on Diego Garcia waterboarding hajis. You're still at that "one time in Band Camp" stage of storytelling about all the hijinks you used to get up to in high school eight months ago or whatever. So please take this in the convivial spirit of one retired Edgelord to one who should: You're making the world worse. Stop it.I know she's a writer or whatever but generally successful writers don't need to beg for donations. I can appreciate the type of insight here but the bigger problem is why are you doing this to begin with.
By the time the bombs began to fall in Afghanistan, 88 percent of us wanted war. The remaining 12 percent were either ignored or, worse, attacked as traitors.