Never Forget The Opportunity We Squandered
Posted on September 11, 2009 at 4:11 pmThere is certainly no shortage of remembrances today of the anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks of 2001. My feed reader, inbox and Tweetdeck are filled to the brim — personal reflections, analysis of what it all means eight years later and ubiquitous symbolic acknowledgments that today is THAT day.
What I can’t help but think about watching all these remembrances fly by is the opportunity we missed in the wake of the tragedy. While we should mourn the 2,998 people who died that day, what we also need to mourn is the loss of a moment. It was a moment great nations don’t get very often, a chance at redemption and reconciliation with a world increasingly disturbed by its power and the way it is thrown around.
While many Americans weren’t aware of it, 9/11 was just an extreme symptom of a greater distaste of American power that was developing around the globe. Deserved or undeserved, the world was starting to turn against America. Certain parts of it, obviously, more than others.
On 9/11, an extreme sect of that certain part of the world who had grown increasingly suspicious and fearful of the American Empire lashed out in a devastating way. They struck us on our own soil. In that moment all the world was with us. Sure, there were pockets in the Islamic world where the attacks were cheered, but that was minimal.
The terrorists, quite simply, had overplayed their hand. If they thought that the world was suddenly going to ride to the sound of the guns and take up the fight against the wicked American imperialists, they were wrong. The attack rallied the civilized world to our side. Peoples and regimes who did not necessarily have the greatest love for us were with us on that day.
If, in the days and months after Sept. 11, 2001, we had gone and identified those responsible and almost literally ripped them limb from limb in front of their wives and children, the world would have looked the other way.
We were going to be given a lot of latitude to exact our revenge and take out the people responsible. On that day, our cause, was the world’s cause.
But instead of concentrating on covert ops and the War in Afghanistan, we went in search of other monsters to destroy. We decided that we would use the opportunity presented by 9/11 to settle some old scores and start the process of shaping the Middle East in our image. We invaded Iraq — preemptively and (defacto) unilaterally.
In short, we acted exactly like the imperialistic thugs the terrorist scum who attacked us said we were. We experienced a tragic loss on 9/11. There can be and is no doubt about that.
But out of that tragedy could have come something good for our nation and its position in the world.
That opportunity was squandered by men and women who could not be satisfied with mere revenge. They sought to eliminate future threats by setting out to democratize the Middle East. Instead, they created more threats. These threats, to our image and our reputation, may not be visible but they have cost us.
When you remember September 11th, remember the day and mourn for the loss of life but remember also what followed.
Because that too was a tragedy.
Comments
39 Responses to “Never Forget The Opportunity We Squandered”
Tour de force, ACK–as the French friends we lost would say…
Very good job, Kleinheider. I appreciate those comments greatly.
Not to mention energy independence.
Not to mention economic justice.
We became the terrorists we claimed to oppose.
ACK, thanks for reminding us of this.
Ben Vos writes
September 11th, 2009 4:42 pm
We became the terrorists we claimed to oppose.
Terrorist purposefully kill civilians.
The US has not purposefully targeted Civilians, with exception of very Few Rouge Solders
There have been ~95,000 killed in Iraq since 2003.
~5000 were killed by the Coalition forces.
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
Iraq Body Count is an ongoing human security project which maintains and updates the world’s largest public database of violent civilian deaths during and since the 2003 invasion. The count encompasses non-combatants killed by military or paramilitary action and the breakdown in civil security following the invasion.
Data is drawn from cross-checked media reports, hospital, morgue, NGO and official figures to produce a credible record of known deaths and incidents. (more in About IBC)
Blame America first. Why am I not surprised that Klanheider’s conclusion and his Leftists that will inevitably agree with his pap that they’ll mistake as penetrating?
The world wasn’t with us. They never were. “Remember Poland!” They joked.
Sure, they offered token words unlike Van Jones who said we deserved it the day it happened but at the end of the day - they are just words.
Once the Taliban was toppled, their in-country Al Qaeda fled to the mountainous region between them and Pakistan. Were we going to topple a nuclear Pakistan to get to them considering the Islamic sympathizers in their own government? We see where that’s going today.
Please let that be the quote that gets you fired.
Is Iraq our 51st state yet? Is Afghanistan? Are we reaping the whirlwind of cheap oil by plundering Iraq.
You are so completely fucking full of shit.
Hardly. The tale of US intervention overseas has been overwhelmingly in favor of Islamic countries from Somalia, to Kosovo, to Kuwait to Afghanistan to Iraq II. America has spared no expense to free and provide aid to Islamic hardliners who would cut their Christian heads off in a second if given the chance.
You really shouldn’t hide behind your snarky titles and one-line summary links. These long posts are better suited to your comrades here. And give you enough rope to hang yourself.
Luckily, we now have a wonderful Christ on Earth who will bow and scrape to kiss the feet of the House of Saud, will throw a welcoming hug on Comrade Chavez, will claim Ahmadinejad gunning down protesters in the streets after stealing an election is “spirited debate”, sat on his hands while Russia still occupies Georgia and threatens the Ukraine and let the man who murdered almost two hundred Americans in the Lockerbie bomber go without a word.
9/11 taught most Americans that the world is a smaller place now than the oceans can shield us from. So do we pick a bastard and stick with him while he oppresses his people? That’s your alternative.
No, the imperialistic thugs will just assassinate other country’s leaders to make Klanheider happy.
Blame America first. Why am I not surprised that Klanheider’s conclusion and his Leftists that will inevitably agree with his pap that they’ll mistake as penetrating?
The world wasn’t with us. They never were. “Remember Poland!” They joked.
Sure, they offered token words unlike Van Jones who said we deserved it the day it happened but at the end of the day - they are just words.
Once the Taliban was toppled, their in-country Al Qaeda fled to the mountainous region between them and Pakistan. Were we going to topple a nuclear Pakistan to get to them considering the Islamic sympathizers in their own government? We see where that’s going today.
Please let that be the quote that gets you fired.
Is Iraq our 51st state yet? Is Afghanistan? Are we reaping the whirlwind of cheap oil by plundering Iraq.
You are so completely fucking full of shit.
Hardly. The tale of US intervention overseas has been overwhelmingly in favor of Islamic countries from Somalia, to Kosovo, to Kuwait to Afghanistan to Iraq II. America has spared no expense to free and provide aid to Islamic hardliners who would cut their Christian heads off in a second if given the chance.
You really shouldn’t hide behind your snarky titles and one-line summary links. These long posts are better suited to your comrades here. And give you enough rope to hang yourself.
Luckily, we now have a wonderful Christ on Earth who will bow and scrape to kiss the feet of the House of Saud, will throw a welcoming hug on Comrade Chavez, will claim Ahmadinejad gunning down protesters in the streets after stealing an election is “spirited debate”, sat on his hands while Russia still occupies Georgia and threatens the Ukraine and let the man who murdered almost two hundred Americans in the Lockerbie bomber go without a word.
9/11 taught most Americans that the world is a smaller place now than the oceans can shield us from. So do we pick a bastard and stick with him while he oppresses his people? That’s your alternative.
No, the non-imperialistic thugs will just assassinate other country’s leaders to make Klanheider happy.
I could not disagree with you more.
And squander we did. We had the sympathy of the world after 9-11 and completely blew it. Letting the Bin Ladens fly out of our country and never interrogating them was a huge mistake. Focusing on Saddam and not Bin Laden still angers me. Bush and Cheney exploited our Nation’s grief. Unforgivable.
TN Volunteer, like usual you have your facts wrong. Baghdad alone has had over 95,000 deaths from this war. One of the first things we did after invading Iraq was to shut down the casualty count of civilians. But it isn’t hard to get some good estimates from the media feeds, for instance this week alone: 44 killed in Baghdad on Monday, 39 killed on Wednesday… every freaking day there is some kind of violence there. In January 2007, the numbers were in the thousands for Baghdad. Estimates of Iraqi civilians killed during this war are somewhere between 600,000 to well over a million. Sigh.
Thanks, ACK. What a powerful commentary. And I agree with you 100%. We did lose the moment. To our shame, and the blame is our own.
The day before 9/11 I had gone shopping and bought some new clothes for fall. The day after 9/11 my first impulse was to return them all. My impulse was to plant a garden, sew my own clothes, cut back, ride a bike, do *something* to help. Remember everyone giving blood?
I was told to go shopping. My first impulse was wrong. Apparently I was naively out of touch with a modern capitalist society. I thought I’d be asked to sacrifice but I wasn’t. I was asked to carry on as if nothing had happened.
We had a moment and we lost it.
To those who feel we should not be fighting - the bad dudes want you dead too. How do you propose to stop them when they will employ any means to satisfy their want?
Nice work, ACK.
“They sought to eliminate a future threats by setting out to democratize the Middle East and instead created many more threats.”
Yeah, there wouldn’t ever have been any American hatred, had we not gone into Iraq. Of course supporting Israel started it all. Right AC? It’s all our fault. Exactly.
Please let this be your column in The City Paper next week.
What? The Nashville Post will let you call townhall protesters faggots for 6 months but won’t let your maybe we deserved 9/11, maybe we didn’t one get the wider audience it deserves?
“In short, we acte exactly like the imperialistic thugs the terrorist scum who attacked us said we were.”
Your logic is far worse than your typo.
This is the last time I will ever come to this website again. I’m sure I wont be the only one. What fucking moron.
ACK, this may be your finest yet.
Brian, I am impressed; how does you see to type when your head is shoved so far up your ass? That’s really amazing.
Bravo, ACK, bravo!
Great post, Adam.
Great post. Shake off them haters.
To all the haters - This is not about “blaming America” it’s about recognizing a missed opportunity. That you are so blinded by your jingoistic fealty to the previous administration’s intemperate actions says more about your ability to rationally analyze what has happened over the past 8 years than the ridiculous tea bags that adorn your tin foil hats.
Man, I knew the haters would come out in full force. Almost always the guys who never wore the uniform. Right, ladies?
You got it, Private Pencil. Staff Sergeant of the Stateside Fightin’ Secretaries.
Amen.
The neocon army is still marching, er, correction, typing hard to their objective.
“In short, we acted exactly like the imperialistic thugs the terrorist scum who attacked us said we were. We experienced a tragic loss on 9/11. There can be and is no doubt about that.”
I agree.
We played right into Bin Laden’s hands and confirmed his rhetoric that we are an imperialistic nation bent on ruling the Arab world.
An America full of hypocrites who proclaim their intention is to secure “liberty” and “freedom” for the Arab world, and then disprove it with Abu Gharib, renditions, and EIT (AKA- torture).
People here may not see it this way. But that’s exactly how it is seen in the Middle East.
Not only did we lose the opportunity to mete out justice to the terrorists, we lost all sense of justice altogether. We sent people to other countries to be tortured. We tortured some ourselves. We locked up American citizens without charges or trial for years.
In a twisted way, Dick Cheney is correct: the actions of the Administration after 9/11 DID ensure that we would not have another attack on American soil. The means of achieving that end, however, guaranteed that there would be attacks on British soil, on Spanish soil, and against Americans all over the sands of the Middle East. But by banning photographers from Dover to keep pictures of American caskets coming home, and by continuing to urge us all to keep shopping, they got away with most of it without our notice.
I love my country. 9/11 was personal to me, and I wanted nothing more than to find bin Laden, lock him in a cell papered with the ‘Missing’ posters that covered store windows in New York City, and pipe in a voice reading the names of the dead, all day every day until he died. But that will never happen, and it makes me very, very angry.
That’s it precisely… used the opportunity to settle old scores and shape the Middle East instead of fighting a war of maneuver using intelligence,stealth, and diplomacy.
There is nothing “Leftist” in Kleinheider’s analysis. Bob Novak, Pat Buchanan, Jim Webb, and more were vocal in opposition. Other conservatives were careful and restrained. That’s understandable when you have VP Cheney dismissing questions with, “they haven’t seen the intelligence we have.” The clear implication was that there were biological and/or chemical weapons in development… scary stuff. Even then an invasion/occupation was not the best option.
Another big lost opportunity: Bush could have used the event, and gotten bi-partisan support, to introduce a sustained and substantial increase in the gas tax. As we moved toward alternative fuels as we adjusted our lifestyle we could have left it to the Chinese to worry about maintaining the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf. The Gulf states would have moved to police the terrorism as they saw us moving away from dependence on their cash cow - black gold.
Those who make this whole thing a narrative about whether or not we’ll “wimp out” display the mentality of the drunken, jersey-wearing football fan or soccer hooligan. And, I think Mack is right. Those people tend to be the folks who never suited up and actually played football.
So, we’re agreed. This should run in The City Paper on Monday morning.
It’s too good to just be squirreled away on some little-read leftwing newspaper blog.
If you’re still missing the point eight years later, you’re never going to get the point.
No, I’ve got the point just fine. You can’t address the argument so you say “you’re heads up your ass, chickenhawk, chickenhawk”. Yea. I think I get the deep insights we’ve come to expect from Bush=Hitler crowd.
Nevermind that you Obamatards burned up the ballot box to support a guy who said that he was going to surge troops into Afghanistan and possibly Pakistan and yet you little keyboard commandos sit here ignoring the mounting casualties of Afghan civilians and record number of US soldier deaths.
What? Is your recruiter’s office broken?
Brilliant analysis as always, Mr. Kennedy. A real President would move to impose a punitive and regressive gas tax on the country after 9/11 to teach us a lesson about alternative fuels instead of just drilling our own oil. And oh yes, chickenhawk. Again, brilliant. The inmates at our state colleges are truly getting their money’s worth from this particular associate professor.
You’ve got a President who never served anywhere being as chickenhawkish as he can be on Afghanistan and where are you anti-war rallies now?
You sit there and you shut up and you do what you’re told.
As a retired Major in the United States Air Force, who flew multiple combat missions in Afghanistan and Iraq I can say with great certainty that Mr. Kleinheider did not. As such I am sure his opinion is of great value to him and those who believe like him that America is a nation of thugs. That being the case I wonder sometimes what would be the circumstances in which he would take up arms too defend the United States?
I was sorry to see this post. While not perfect this country is not a nation of thugs.
With respect Major Samoose, I don’t think Kleinheider thinks we are a nation of thugs and I don’t think you think he thinks that.
As for under what conditions he would take up arms he didn’t say that we should have “turned the other cheek.”
You’re attacking a straw man. It is beneath you.
martin, you know more respect me than you do the uniform I wore with blood stains. Please don’t patronize me with your high school, 20 something do good logic. You agree with Mr. Kleinheider, I do not but I don’t need some kid to lecture me what a straw man fallacy is. To that point, you are incorrect in your labeling my argument a straw man as I did not take issue with Mr. Kleinheider’s conclusion only his equating America as the same as the terroristst thugs who attacked us on 9/11. That is truly sad and unfortunate.
Brian, Are you against the regressive state sales tax? Would you prefer an income tax?
There is a remote possibility that you might actually think about this… so I’ll explain it to you.
A gas tax would be regressive but there are ways to address that. A gas tax should not be instituted to “teach.” The goal is to both raise revenue and to change behavior. I said nothing about expanding domestic drilling. For the record I favor it strongly. The behavior that we change will force an adjustment from oil-rich countries. It is a way that we can use our market power, our buying power, to our advantage.
The cost of gasoline has been subsidized heavily for years… you don’t think it costs nothing to keep the Persian Gulf open do you? Those sailors have to get paid no?
As for the students at MTSU, if they detect the slightest bias then I am not doing my job. I am confident that former students would not accuse me of “teaching from a particular angle.” On a blog I feel free to op-ed along.
Finally, I try to show great respect for those who see things differently than me. I have learned a great deal from others, from people with whom I disagree. Please feel free to sway me. I’ll give you this hint… if you show others respect, the respect that you’d like to be shown, they’ll be open to what you have to say.
How did an Air Force type get a blood stained uniform?
I’m serious. We’re you shot down? Perhaps if I heard the story I’d understand your perspective better. Will you give us the story?
martin, thank you for heart felt concern. But you are no more interested in my injuires than I am in telling you. My story? Why do you even care? We act like terriost thugs, remember? No martin I don’t owe you an explanation, moreover it is you and Mr. Kleinheider who owe the men and women of the armed services an expalnation with the “we acted exactly like the imperialiest thugs and terriost scum”.
I think it is time for me to go. Mr. Kleinheider and All be well.
God Bless America.
You want to get distracted by the word “regressive”? Because I’m not. Take it out and point still stands.
I’ll do it for you.
An economy teetering after an attack on one of our major financial institutions and your solution is to raise taxes.
There was another economist somewhere who supported raising gas tax, still supports the policy. His name is Greg Mankiw, teaches at Harvard and was Chairman of President’s council of economic advisors… under George W.
But really Brian you must be joking. A better policy was what we actually did? Debate all you want about what we should do now, but you don’t seriously hold the position that if we could go back in time that we should pursue the same policy, or do you?
Major Samoose,
You brought up the “blood stains.” Even if you don’t want to share the story with me perhaps others would like to hear. Maybe Kleinheider would benefit.
Kleinheider this could have been an insightful, thought provoking analysis. If only you could have restrained your inflammatory instincts. “In short, we acted exactly like the imperialistic thugs the terrorist scum who attacked us said we were.” This could have been omitted or rephrased.
I agree that the invasion of Iraq was politically and strategically flawed. I volunteered for the first Desert Storm to evict Iraq from Kuwait. It should have been left at that.
The troops used in Iraq could have been used early on in Afganistan and northern Pakistan, particularly in the Tora Bora mountains.
Secertary Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks did the country a serious disservice by agreeing with their political masters in this strategy.
Some of you seemed to have missed the body of Kleinheider’s opionion that “If, in the days and months after Sept. 11, 2001, we had gone and identified those responsible and almost literally ripped them limb from limb in front of their wives and children, the world would have looked the other way.” “But instead of concentrating on covert ops and the War in Afghanistan, we went in search of other monsters to destroy.”
As usual a piece of red meat will distract a lot of hungry dogs.