The lessons of Sept. 11

"Listen carefully: We're good, they're evil, nothing is relative.... No matter what your daughter's political science professor says, we didn't start this."

Larry Miller, The Weekly Standard, Jan. 14, 2002

THOMAS L. Friedman, the New York Times columnist who normally knows better, used that quote as part of what he called his "9/11 lesson plan," a curriculum for teachers who are trying to figure out what to tell their students on the anniversary of the worst-ever terrorist attacks on American soil. His point – that the attackers were just bad, awful people who hate the United States and who can "only be defeated, not negotiated with" – is such a glaringly naive analysis of the geopolitics of the Sept. 11 attacks that it would be laughable if it weren't for the fact that a huge number of people, including the president of the United States, seem to have bought into it.

Noam Chomsky put it well in a column published in the U.K. Guardian Sept. 9: "It may be comforting to pretend that our enemies 'hate our freedoms,' as President Bush stated, but it is hardly wise to ignore the real world, which conveys different lessons."

A long, painful year after the brutal, bloody attacks, the Bush administration has launched the greatest assault on civil liberties this country has seen since the 1950s. Hate crimes and discrimination against Muslims and people of Middle Eastern descent have risen to a frightening level. U.S. forces have invaded Afghanistan and are poised to invade Iraq – a move that would profoundly change American military policy and amount to a preemptive strike to overthrow a government that has taken no hostile action against us. The United States is increasingly isolated in world opinion, unwilling to wait for the support of the United Nations or even traditional allies before launching unilateral military action.

And while almost every major media outlet in the nation talks about Sept. 11, 2001, as the "day that everything changed," the truth is that the U.S. policies that have helped create so much animosity in the rest of the world have changed very little – and certainly not for the better.

• • •

There is no way to look back honestly on the past year without recognizing that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were a human tragedy of immense proportions. The horror of watching the high-rise buildings burst into flames, of seeing people jumping to their deaths from 70 stories up to avoid burning to death, of seeing the towers crumble and imagining the terror inside as 3,000 people died, many of them crushed and burned beyond recognition ... it's the stuff of lasting nightmares and will be for many years to come.

And it's entirely understandable that millions of sympathetic people here and around the world wanted to respond by taking revenge. Bush parlayed that into the invasion of Afghanistan and the pending invasion of Iraq – and has enjoyed stellar poll numbers in the process.

But as we noted at the time, there was another option, one that could have been just as effective – and a lot more consistent with the sense of justice that is supposed to be an integral part of this country's identity. Geoffrey Robertson made the crucial argument in a Sept. 14, 2001, column in the U.K. Guardian: the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks should have been treated not as acts of war but as crimes, heinous crimes against humanity.

There were, and are, precedents for that, going back to Nuremburg but more recently involving the arrest and trial of Slobodan Milosovic, and there was, and is, a growing body of international law that could be used to support a multinational effort to bring criminals to justice. In fact, the United Nations has finally (over U.S. opposition) established an international criminal court.

But instead of taking that route, the administration insisted that the only possible option was a full-scale military operation – which has failed to lead to the death or capture of Osama bin Laden or, as far as we know, to the destruction of his terrorist network. It has cost billions of dollars and led to a large number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. The invasion of Iraq will be far, far worse.

Meanwhile, the administration is demanding that every country that gets U.S. military assistance refuse to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the U.N.'s international court over American troops or officials.

• • •

Sept. 11 should have been a wake-up call – not to overzealous prosecutors and politicians who argue that the United States is too loose and free, but to the millions of people in this country who for too long have paid too little attention to what is being done elsewhere in the world by our government, in our name.

The problems aren't new: As Chomsky pointed out in his column, 44 years ago President Eisenhower asked his National Security Council to look into the "campaigns of hatred against us [in the Arab world], not by the governments but by the people." The council's conclusion: the United States is hated because it supports corrupt and oppressive governments and is "opposing political or economic progress" because of its interest in controlling the oil resources of the region.

The irony of Bush's approach to fighting terrorism is that his form of unilateral, bomb-first-and-ask-questions-later foreign policy will only make more endless enemies and create a more unfriendly world. And the threat of terrorism will only grow. As Paul Krugman pointed out in a New York Times column Sept. 10, it makes no sense to look at the fight against terrorism as a war. Wars typically have an end – and this fight will go on indefinitely. And as it drags on with no end in sight, the assaults on civil liberties will continue.

A year after Sept. 11, the United States badly needs a strong movement demanding an end to the attacks on civil liberties at home, an end to pointless military action, and a fundamental change in U.S. foreign policy around the world. Ending our addiction to oil (which is the root cause of a large part of the tension in the Middle East) would be a fine place to start.

P.S.: Why is the major news media so unwilling to challenge the administration? Beyond the general pro-war sycophancy, there may be another reason: The handful of big corporations that own the vast majority of the U.S. media are pushing the administration hard for further deregulation, to allow further concentration of media control. When it's profits against news, profits win.