Wednesday, 12 September 2007

Rants

9/11 + Six Years + One Day: Myths and Hopes

Well, I spent a good deal of Tuesday reading various 9/11 posts, all the while trying to organize my thoughts for a post of my own. Things never did gel, so a day late, instead of a "here's how I feel this year" post, a look at some myths that have grown up around 9/11, some hopes that never materialized, and some lessons learned.  


Myth: "It's too bad: We were so unified after 9/11… until George Bush got us into the wrong war/failed to make a case/lied."

Reality: In America, our domestic "Blame America First"-ers and Bush Bashers got things underway well before the towers stopped smoking: Read this, this, this[1], this, this, this, this and this. Some of us may have felt the unity because we wanted it to be, and because the first cries of "why do they hate us?" were shouted down, but as "Trimegistus" said in his comment:

The Left (and their psychological allies the conspiracy theorists) were never unified with the rest of us on 9/11. They just kept their despicable opinions quiet for a while.

Myth: The Europeans (and the world community) were behind us, until George Bush got us into the wrong war/failed to make a case/lied.
No, the majority of the "world community" "supported" us (when it did so) for only so long as we didn't. actually take any concrete action. Remember the treachery and obstructionism by France and Germany at the United Nations during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Also recall how the expressions of "support" from our "allies" were frequently tinged with schadenfreude. And remember the infamous September 12th BBC "Question Time," with its audience stacked with America-bashers.

Myth: "We should have put American on a war footing: Rationing, Economic Controls, Scrap-Metal Drives, a Military Draft, all of it."
Fighting a war takes lots of money, and a good way to get it is to have a strong economy to draw it from. If you look at the figures, the folks who decried "the best thing you can do is go shopping" have egg on their faces:
Since September 11, the economy hasn't suffered a single down quarter. In fact, it has notched 23 straight quarters of economic growth. (And despite the subprime mortgage crisis, this is likely to be the 24th straight quarter of growth.) Those numbers are especially amazing when you consider that when the terrorist attacks happened, the Internet stock bubble was in full implosion mode. The economy dipped in the third quarter of 2001 and was slightly negative in two of the previous four quarters. But it's been nothing but growth since then. Overall, the American economy is, adjusting for inflation, $1.65 trillion bigger than it was six years ago. To put that gigantic number in some perspective, the U.S. economy has added the equivalent of five Saudi Arabias, eight Irans, 13 Pakistans, or 15 Egypts, depending on your preference. ...[Today] the Dow is 37 percent higher than it was on Sept. 10, 2001... [and] the unemployment rate is 4.6 percent today vs. 5.7 percent back then. -- Capital Commerce blog at U.S. News & World Report
Another thing you need to fight a war is manpower, but that doesn't seem to be a problem, as the services continue to meet or exceed recruiting goals, without a draft and without lowering standards.
While it's possible to argue that stronger action on the domestic front might have helped demonstrate the administration's seriousness and convince some of the unconvinced, in retrospect "getting back to normal" was the right thing to do.[2] One wonders if the people who were calling for "full mobiliztion," like the Congressional Democrats who want to reinstate the draft, were hoping to exploit the resulting social and economic disruption. Hmmm...?

Hope: The attack on our country would make our politicians start taking things seriously.
Well, no. Whether it's Republicans loading appropriation bills with earmarks or Democrats sucking up to Syria, the past 6 years have demonstrated that it's impossible to underestimate the conduct of American politicians. This is partly because it's their nature, and nothing new. (Read about the conduct of Congress during the Civil War, and you'll be amazed that the Union managed to survive, let alone win.) We also suffer from a "time is out of joint" problem: Today's challenges call for a Churchill, fate chose to make ours Ward. Meanwhile, our "leaders" continue to articulate the old internationalist-PC-feel-good way of thinking
Among many other things, 9/11 was a failure of human understanding […] It was a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States. But it was also a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other. -- Massachusetts governor Deval Partick, speaking at that state's 9/11 ceremony yesterday[3]
(And it's everywhere! Here's Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, two days ago:
.[The 9/11 terrorist attacks showed that] if we abandon our fellow human beings to lives of poverty, brutality and ignorance, in today’s global village their misery will eventually and inevitably become our own.
Ugh!)
And despite the shot across the bow delivered by voters in the 2006 election, things in Washington have proceeded as usual.
And the failure to set standards and act decisively starts at the top...

Hope: The attack on our country would make George Bush start taking things seriously.
America attacked needed a Commander In Chief who could articulate the issues and lead by example. Instead we had George Bush, who failed to name the enemy (calling it a "war on terror"[4] instead of a war on Islamic fascism), failed to define the objective (How do you fight "terror?" So we "get" Al Quaida-- then what?), and failed to define success. When toughness was needed, he stove to be liked.[5] When incompetence should have been punished, he chose to reward loyalty. When he should have gotten "out front," he let others speak for him. When the time came to draw lines, he played footsie with the Saudis. And when he should have kept his eye on the ball, he instead wasted the nation's energy and squandered political capital by nominating cronies to the Supreme Court and by pushing for amnesty for illegal immigrants. 9/11 gave George Bush an opportunity for greatness. Looks like he blew it.[6]

Hope: The attack on our country would make our intellectuals start taking things seriously.
Many did reevaluate their worldviews after 9/11. You'll find some of those people in the comment threads of blogs like Roger's place and Protein Wisdom. But far too many, faced with cognitive dissonance, retreated to a mix of their old paradigms and magical thinking. A body of people who characterize themselves "reality-based" have failed to face... reality. The consequences have ranged from ludicrous to tragic: From feminists and gay activists lining up with a religion that would repress the one and execute the other, to the American Civil Liberties Union cranking out enemy propaganda in the form of a 10,000-page list of "American Military Atrocities."[7]

Hope: The attack on our country would make the media start taking things seriously.
After 2001's Summer of all-sharks-all-the-time, some of us hoped that the world after 9/11 would have some serious reportage from the press. Instead, we got more political spin, partisanship, lying-by-omission, and outright deception. The Good Thing about this is that we now know whose side the MSM is on, and it is not America's (or at least not the Americans who aren't leftists or Democrats). The Bad Thing is that there remains a need for a factual, comprehensive source of news. Anybody want to start one?

I've taken most of the day to write this, so I'll conclude with the "lessons learned" in a future post (which will be linked here).

Note: Many links added on 070915.

-----
Footnotes:
[1] The Durham, NC, chapter of the NAACP. Some folks we'd be hearing more from later on.

[2] Could we have done symbolic things, say, impose gasoline rationing but give everybody a 100-gallon-per-week allocation? Perhaps, but such programs have a way of hanging around long past their expiration date. (Recall that we just recently stopped paying the World War II tax on telephone service.) It's also easy to envision such a program being continued and expanded for "good reasons," say carbon emission control.

[3] Nicely called out by Jeff Goldstein:
But in fairness to those 3000 people who died in the WTC attacks, they were never given the choice between “send al Qaeda some flowers and a box of chocolate covered cherries” and “death by immolation or grudging 100 story swan dive.”

[4] ...leading to uncomfortable questions from the Brits in the audience: "So where were you when we were fighting the IRA?"

[5] Paraphrasing a remark today by Bill O'Reilly: "George Bush spent like crazy trying to be liked. Look at where it got him: 30%"

[6] [Added 070912 22:31:] Jonah Goldberg:
...if George Bush had been a better president, John Edwards would never have dreamed of calling the war on terror nothing but a bumper sticker. As it stands right now, if any Democratic candidate other than Joe Biden or maybe Hillary Clinton (!) gets elected we will bug out of Iraq so precipitously it will be indistinguishable from abject defeat in the eyes of the world. And under any of them, the war on terror will become a glorified Elliot Spitzer style legal campaign. That is not a sign that President Bush has adequately led the country or prepared it for the struggles ahead.
The long-term consequences of Bush's incompetence are frightening.

[7] Good wrap-up of reaction to the ACLU's list here.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 21:16:42 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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