Pylimitics

Today is a somber date; twenty-five years since the 9/11…tragedy? Atrocity? Disaster? It’s hard to find the right word, and maybe there isn’t one. It was one of those events that will be marked in history for a very long time. With the perspective of those years since, did anybody learn anything? Was it nothing more than furious, resentful violence that in the end was as pointless as violence seems so often to be?

I think we know at least something about the aims al-Qaida had in conducting the attack. To bankrupt the US, to collapse the US empire, and to remove US presence from the Middle East; those were things Bin Laden claimed. The outcomes were unexpected. In the aftermath of 9/11, the US may have had some aims too. To continue and intensify the politically and stupidly named “war on terror.” To punish any of the attackers that might have been still alive. Beyond that, there were too many conflicting plans and actions, and the outcomes of those were unexpected too.

It’s abundantly clear that the US and the world have changed drastically since 9/11/2001, but while all the changes took place sequentially, I’m not sure you can plot them causally in any sort of a clear throughline. The disastrous war of opportunity in Iraq was called a response to 9/11, but 9/11 appears to have been just an excuse for the US officials who wanted to start that war anyway, for reasons unrelated to al-Qaida. The interminable and also disastrous war in Afghanistan was, perhaps, more connected to 9/11, but its outcome has been nothing like what the US war hawks claimed to expect.

The US is, obviously, still deeply embroiled in the Middle East, and that situation, in retrospect, wasn’t drastically changed by anything al-Qaida did. It has been drastically changed by changes in US regimes, and by Iran. But Iran was never an al-Qaida ally.

It feels like the US empire is in steep decline, if not collapse. But not from 9/11, at least not directly. It seems much more plausible to attribute the decline, most recently at least, to rash, ill-considered decisions by the US regime. The al-Qaida leaders hoped for the collapse of the empire, but the process itself is far different from what they expected. Or at least wished.

If one aim of the attackers was to change US society, that has certainly occurred, and continues. The way we all travel, at least by air, is markedly different now. In the end, maybe that’s the historic trend that can be accurately pinned to the historic event. If that’s really the case, it’s a pathetically sad outcome. Years of planning, lots of money, enormous destruction and loss of life, and what they accomplished was people waiting in longer lines?

I’m constantly surprised by the lack of self-awareness of people who profess violent solutions to anything. Ask the most hawkish war monger what they would do in the face of a vicious, prolonged assault. They will tell you they would continue to resist, to fight back; their resolve would be strengthened in the face of such adversity. But ask them what they think their opponents are going to do in the same situation, and they’ll tell you they expect surrender, defeat, broken resolve. Maybe this is one more aspect of othering, describing people you have some sort of objection to as not really people. As others, who are not like you at all, and thus (you believe) will not act the way you would act (you think) in the same situation you put them in.

The people killed on 9/11, in the polluted aftermath, in the wars of choice excused by 9/11…they could all have been saved by decisions that eschewed violence. That recognized that violent actions are much more likely to deliver results quite different from anything you expect. But with countless lessons from history as well as from life, that seems to be a lesson most of us are unable to learn.