Twenty-five years ago at 9 a.m. I was two hours from New York City preparing to take my almost two year old son to a play date. We were actually supposed to be in France on 9/11, where we were moving to live while I worked on a book. But at the last minute, I had panicked about unfinished stateside work and delayed the ticket by a month.
Norman Rockwell rural USA kind of day. Sparkling September morning. The rumble of a harvester across the road where a lone farmer was cutting his still green crop for winter silage. Eagles soaring over the river valley.
America the beautiful. God shed his grace on thee.
And a toddler on the floor.
We were in a ramshackle house we’d recently bought on our freelance photographer and writer incomes. Had not gotten too far with the fix-up. No radio, no TV nor wifi (actually the option was only dish or dialup and we had neither).
I strapped the child into his car seat and drove ten miles down river,stopping to gas up and that’s where I learned about the disaster. People were clustered around a TV, talking about the buildings, the Pentagon being hit, and maybe the White House!
“Are we at war?” I asked. A young man turned and hissed “If not we oughta be!”
Ten minutes later two riveted mothers stood watching towers fall on TV while babies gamboled nearby. After a while we went outside and they played on some swings. The sky was bright and utterly silent. We watched our baby boys and tried to imagine them in the future. Soldiers?
An editor called that afternoon asking for a column. What did it mean? Want to write about that? I thought: Whatever this means won’t be understood for years. I probably wrote exactly that.
We spent the next two and a half years in France, watching from afar the W regime and its inexorable Iraq war planning. Our country seemed crazier from the outside looking in. As the “shock and awe” came ever closer, the French held regular “manifs” - street protests against the war. Our son’s first memories probably include sitting on his father’s shoulders near the Place de la Republique and watching an effigy of W burning.
When we went back home, people had tied yellow ribbons on trees near our ramshackle house. Support our troops. Ask nothing but what you can do for your country.
If not we oughta be!
The leadup to the iraq war was long. They had to prepare the ground with lies about WMD, remember? Anyone who knew the region understood the difference between the secular dictator Saddam Hussein and the Wahhabi Muslim extremists influenced by Saudi Arabia. Saddam was locking up and torturing them.
Didn’t matter. To most Americans it was all the same. Ay-rabs. Eye-rack. Eye-ran.
Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, Feith, the neocon pro-Israel elves behind the scenes, took great advantage of the general ignorance.
Fact: Our warfighters chased the mastermind into a tunnel in the Afghan mountains. They had Osama bin Laden cornered. But just finishing off Al Qaeda would waste an opportunity and opportunities don’t knock every day. So they left him in there. If you still don’t believe this, read this account by CIA agent and former nuclear security agency official Bruce Held, who, among many others, has explained how the neocon elves around W wanted a war with Iraq so badly that they diverted the military from almost certainly capturing bin Laden in November 2001 to focus on war with Iraq.
They had a better idea about what to do with such an opportunity.
Cheney did too, with his Iraq oilfield map, meeting with the CEOs. Duty number one, how to keep it pumping, and second, divvy it up.
The word “terrorists’ was and still is a useful catchall label, a way to dehumanize whole swathes of oppressed people, as explained in this essay by the American lawyer John Whitbeck.
The label did a lot of lifting for the project. Among our American friends in Paris those years was a professor on sabbatical who I recall looking my husband in the eye when he suggested attacking America was going after Iraq not to fight Wahhabi extremism but for Israel and saying. “That’s antisemitic.” The stakes were clear, the sides drawn. The professor later went on to write a novel channeling Arab women kidnapped by Isis.
Is it anti-Semitic, though, to see American wars in the Middle East as adjunct to support for Israel? A country into which we have poured record billions in defense dollars? And which has spent lavishly in return on lobbying and influence for decades?
A quarter century on, we’re in another war in the Middle East, and no one even bothers to pretend that it’s not for Netanyahu. That’s progress of a kind, I suppose.
Who else wanted those wars? The Saudis and their cousins in the royal families of the other monarchies didn’t mind it at all. No love lost between Wahhabis in charge of trillion dollar sovereign funds and the regional secular strongmen. Now the secular dictators are gone, the oilkings secure in their theocracies are allied with religious ethnostate Israel and lavishing the American president and his family with crypto cash, which the Trumps bank while spending tax dollars on more weapons for Israel.
Eye-rack. Eye-ran.
I think back on the editors’ request 25 years ago today. What did it mean? I didn’t know then.
But a quarter-century on, surely we know what 9/11 meant by now?
We try. A friend of mine argues that 9/11 differs from Pearl Harbor in that America has remained essentially about the same - or at least not as altered as it was after World War Two. That’s one way of looking at it. We haven’t entered a world war. Yet anyway.
But in all other ways, helplessly, we’ve changed utterly and with us, so has the planet. Our government blew through more than $5 trillion on Iraq and Afghanistan that could have been used on any number of actually needed things – education, health care, public works, climate change mitigation. Instead, those wars displaced 37 million people, most of them staggering north into Europe, upending the social order. If you don’t think that has anything to do with the rise in right wing parties in Europe, I suggest you visit any town along the south of France up against the Mediterranean where women in hijabs are pushing strollers, and men in skullcaps sit on the mairie steps.
It is in the rise of the European right feasting on the backlash to displaced millions pouring into Germany France the UK in the wake of the folly of the Iraq war and the wrecking of Syria and Libya and Afghanistan.
It’s here in the xenophobic contagion of that faraway migration, in the lie that terrorists are sneaking over our borders with other brown people, and in the normalization of masked secret police dispensing with due process.
It’s in our populist kleptocrat Trump, the people’s choice after a decade of wasted blood and treasure on the “war on terror” and lies about the grand project of remaking the Middle East.
It’s in the cynicism that bought us this lawless regime and its pharaonic corruption, a trickling down of soak the suckers Trump banditry that infects the entire economic system.
It’s in the malicious gleeful dismantling of systems and norms that once made Americans and, we thought, the world - believe in our exceptionalism.
It is in the chest beating reactionaries spawned by the unmanning effect of the event itself. The manosphere is all about burying a quarter-century of shame at the wave of fear that for a few hours infected - indelibly - the hearts of a certain kind of man.
Yesterday I watched a long video taken from a news chopper of the first tower burning while the announcer talked about getting a better view. The second tower is intact for most of the clip.
Watching it is almost unbearable, as minutes go by, and first one then another plane appears in the sky, but they fly away west - incredible that air traffic was still moving at that last minute, until finally, one darts in and the second great fireball erupts.
These days, we can see such murderous fireballs almost daily in our handheld devices, in real time video of high-tech savagery in Gaza. Yesterday the AP published a great shot of a missile hitting a refugee camp. The whizz-zip of the missile, the orange explosion, the rising belch of smoke.
The vague awareness that oh yeah, there are incinerated people in that cloud
The sound of gunfire, off in the distance … getting used to it now.
Tie a yellow ribbon.
In America, people in the strip malls and boarded up towns in flyoverland were lied to and fooled about this and they know it. Faith in media and government has chipped away. At least the Brits looked back, tried in the Chilcot report to place some accountability for great folly, finding the UK chose to join the U.S. “before peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted.” And based on dishonest and flawed “intelligence.”
AKA lies.
The farther away you were from ground zero the stronger the jingo-ism, that was another lesson learned. Islamophobia is still a guaranteed crowd-pleaser for Republicans with their low propensity voters and rural base. Witness the revolting spectacle of “America’s Mayor” Rudy Giuliani and others telling New York’s Muslim Mayor to stay away from today’s memorial downtown as Fox News’ wallpaper for these past days.
Are we at War?
If not we oughta be!
I'll never forget that day either. I was working at Yale University's New School of Medicine as a pipe fitter and a plumber who was always joking around had his flip phone in hand at a 9 am coffee break and told fifty or so of us the news. My partner who I rode with to work wife was working in the towers that day and his daughter was attending school in NYC. They were fine and never got a scratch.
P.P.S. Would NATO invoke Article 5 for us today?