9/11

So, it’s been four years since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Inevitably, this year 9/11 will draw comparisons to Hurricane Katrina. With respect to the property damage, 9/11 doesn’t hold a candle to Katrina. I suspect the death toll will end up being similar, though Katrina may end up with a higher body count. 9/11 carried a much greater sense of violation since it was perpetrated by malicious humans rather than by indifferent nature.

I recall the day of the attacks, getting started on work when one of the people who works in my office said what she’d seen on television before heading out. Immediately I was on the Internet, details were sketchy. As the day progressed, rumors were rampant — I recall stories about a car bomb outside the Supreme Court, for example. The local gas station jacked up prices. I remember crying just a little bit on the way home that night. Americans were united. In fact, most of the world was united in condemning the acts. The most touching example, for me, was some African tribe sending us a herd of cattle or somesuch. Clearly, they needed the herd more than we ever could. But, it was a very gracious gesture from those who have very little to America, which has so very much.

Since then, my feelings about 9/11 have changed. Some of it is just the passage of time. But, now I can’t think about 9/11 without associating it with the Bush administration who has rammed it down our throats at every chance and used it as an excuse for any policy it cared to pursue. My deliberate recollection of how I felt during and soon after the attacks is very different from my casual response when the term is brought up. Now, my knee-jerk reaction is an eye roll, because I have just come to expect that the person invoking 9/11 is doing so to forward their own agenda.

Being a history guy, and having heard 9/11 compared repeatedly to Pearl Harbor, it’s interesting to think about what we had accomplished between 12/7/41 and 12/7/45 versus what we’ve accomplished between 9/11/01 and 9/11/05. We’ve invaded Afghanistan, displaced the Taliban, and had some success in making Afghanistan a better place. Though that success seems to have stalled and I’m not sure how well we’re doing there in recent years. We have also, improbably, invaded Iraq, displaced it’s weak, secular dictator with essentially a state of chaos where radical Islamists seem to be gaining the upper hand. Certainly they are stronger in Iraq now than they were before we invaded. We don’t appear to have taken any action at all against Saudi Arabia or Egypt or the institutions in both countries that contributed to almost all of the 9/11 suiciders being from those countries. And, of course, Osama bin Laden is still at large.

During the World War II period, we had defeated two major powers (three if you include Italy — but Italy always seems like the red-headed Axis step child); Hitler was dead; we had demanded and received sacrifice from Americans but we had accomplished our mission and were headed to much better times than even those that had preceded the war.

Before Hurricane Katrina, it was pretty easy for administration apologists to just shrug that Terrorism is a more elusive and intractable enemy than the Japanese Empire or the German Reich. After the incompetence displayed in the wake of Katrina, particularly with respect to the personnel put in charge of major government agencies (“Brownie’s doing a great job”), it’s much easier to suspect that our problems in the War on Terror(ism/ists) have as much to do with incompetence as with the difficulty of the problem.

Maybe I’m to blame for my skepticism, cynicism, and politics, but my memory of 9/11 has been tainted. And it’s a shame.