Duo horribilia decennia began, in a sense, not on 11th September, 2001, but almost ten months earlier. On December 12th, the United States Supreme Court hands down a split decision, five for, four against, in the case of Bush v. Gore.
The appellee is the Vice-President and, up until recently, presumed future President of the United States. Albert Arnold Gore is the son of a Tennessee senator. He fought in Vietnam for the sake of his father’s career, and, in time, he succeeded to his job. A bright young family man, Bill Clinton picked him in 1992 to be his number two, so as to stifle rumours about his own conduct.
They defeated George H. W. Bush. Eight years of Clinton in charge has left the economy booming. The government is finally starting to pay down the huge national debt. Now, the reins are being handed over. Even though he has distanced himself from his sleazy boss Bill, picking Clinton critic Joe Lieberman for his own VP, he can reasonably expect to beat Bush Jr.
And he does, nationally, by over half a million votes. But the American system does not award the Presidency to the most popular candidate. On November 7th, whoever controls Florida controls the country. And when all is said and done, Bush has five hundred and thirty-seven more votes. (Incidentally, the man who controls the state full-time is Governor Jeb Bush, close relation.) After over a month of recounts and controversy, the Supreme Court puts the final nail in the coffin.
Gore has, unexpectedly, thrown a winnable election. The why matters not so much as the what could have happened instead.
The Clinton administration knew the threat al-Qaeda posed. They had tried to kill Bill in 1994 and 1996. Open war commenced in 1998 when embassy bombings killed 224 people, provoking a retaliatory strike in Sudan. This rising violence seemed to have culminated, under a month before the election, with a lethal strike on the U.S.S Cole.
Does that mean that Gore could have stopped 9/11? I doubt it. Even if they believed an attack was coming, nobody imagined the attack would come in the form it did. Nine months took forever for my pregnant mum, who watched the Twin Towers coming down from England, and worried about the world she would shortly be bringing her child into, and never forget where she was on 9/11. Nine months speeds by in the corridors of government, where there are a hundred things to deal with and never enough time to, and it’s easy to forget you need to deal with something until that thing happens.
There is a disaster Gore could have averted. He had been pushing for congressional action on climate change for a quarter century now. To mobilise Congress on such a distant issue would have challenged him. Still, his was a less toxic time in every sense of the word. Climate action would have gotten more bang for less buck and, crucially, the government had surplus cash it could afford to set aside, perhaps in his second term once debt went down.
Instead, Bush sat out of the Kyoto Protocol, the first big international step on climate change. His own policy plans led with tax cuts that turned the surplus into a deficit. His own personality indicated no great preparedness to confront the crises of the future: indeed, he campaigned on less intervention than Gore, and of course less acrimony than in the Clinton era. The next four years seemed set up to be a snooze.
Nine months after inauguration, Bush is back in Florida. His chief of staff, Andrew Card, reassures him that “it should be an easy day”. They drive to an elementary school, where Bush prepares to promote his deeply flawed No Child Left Behind Act. (Democrats criticise how underfunded the Act is, suggesting a better use for the taxes he cut.)
As he approaches, Card informs him a plane has hit the World Trade Center. He discusses the possible accident with national security advisor Condolezza Rice, before entering a classroom to conduct a children’s reading exercise, The Pet Goat. Just as he is about to begin, Card whispers to him that "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack." Bush acknowledges, and then spends the next nine minutes explaining words that end with the letter “E” to children. Meanwhile, the World Trade Centre is ablaze.
That morning, al-Qaeda put to the test a couple years of plotting. They sacrificed nineteen terrorists and a few pieces of equipment. They murdered fifty-five military personnel, four hundred and sixteen first responders, and two thousand, five hundred and six people. The destruction was horrific and inhumane. Osama bin Laden had created a force multiplier on a staggering level. No terrorists would ever top this sheer barbarity, cruelty, and extreme violence. They would never get such a chance at weaponising aircraft again.
The imposition of obvious, common-sense protections was not enough to sate the demands of the American public. Hate crimes spiked. California resident Frank Silva Roque often ranted against immigrants. That day, he declared he was “going to go out and shoot some towel-heads” Four days later, 9/11 claimed its 2,978th victim: Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh murdered on the same day Roque also shot at a Lebanese-American and at an Afghan-American family.
The political climate had been completely transformed. No longer could they coast by on an easy breeze. Now a hard rain was going to fall. Over 2001 and 2002, Democrats and Republicans came together again and again to erect a security state within a democracy. The USA PATRIOT Act unlocked surveillance and sentencing measures were dangerous for the 18 years it operated for.
For instance, Palestinian-American Sami Amin Al-Arian, who attracted attention simply for making controversial and inflammatory remarks in a free country, was detained for a dozen years under conditions that violated international law. The case is too complicated for me to make head or tail of, but he clearly can’t have been a dangerous terrorist: the US eventually washed its hands of him by deporting him to NATO ally Turkey.
To call the Patriot Act Orwellian exaggerates its provisions. Orwell's fear was a society where everybody spied on everybody, and the government on us all. Actions like these in our countries are always hyperfocused on targeting and harassing minorities like Muslims and Arabs.
However, the naming scheme certainly was Orwellian, and spoke to a wider culture. Anything that could claim to be toughter on terrorism met with approval. The more cruel, the more extreme the prosecution and punishment, the likelier it was to go ahead. To stand against all of this was to endanger yourself and your family, particularly if that family came from the Middle East or you prayed in the direction of the Kaaba. This was democracy only working in one direction: down, to the ant heap of totalitarianism.
The government was embarrassed. Those who understood al-Qaeda had spent years Cassandrising. Ahmad Shah Massoud, who you can read more about here, stood before the European Parliament on April 20th, 2001, and warned that his army had gathered intelligence on an incoming terror attack on US soil. Now, with tears evaporating off the shame on their cheeks, American leaders tried to undo their errors by compounding them.
I cannot say whether Gore would have invaded Afghanistan, and the wisdom of that decision is still debated today. On the other hand, it is hard to picture any administration other than that of Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, making a target out of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, and staying the course in the face of fierce criticism, and a mounting lack of evidence to support their case. (Even Lieberman, who voted for the Iraq War, admitted his would-be administration probably wouldn’t have done so.)
Their justification is that they wanted to stop the next 9/11: a potential Iraqi chemical or nuclear strike. The desire to avoid a WMD arms race across the Middle East is noble. There is nothing to suggest rational, reasonably unbiased leaders would believe Iraq was anywhere near WMD capacity.
To allege alternative motives is to descend into a mire of conspiracy theories I shan’t go near. I don’t know enough, anyway. All I can do is point my audience to Donald Rumsfeld’s memo penned on November 27th, 2001. Whatever the rest of the administration was thinking, that memo undeniably demonstrates the United States Secretary of Defense was already plotting to instigate a war with Iraq, on whatever grounds he could get his hand on.
Thirty years ago, my dad was working on air traffic control in the Middle East, and he watched as a hurricane of American aircraft flooded the radar screens, on their way to pummel what became known as the “Highway of Death”. Bush's dad had struck back against Iraqi forces pouring into Kuwait and beaten them, but he stuck to liberating Kuwaitis and left Saddam in power. The Bush administration were convinced that the right thing to do, in order to save Kurds from further gassing and end Saddam's oppression, was to "finish the job".
General Wesley Clark alleged Paul Wolfowitz, who served in both Bush administrations, told him after the Gulf War that "with the end of the Cold War, we can now use our military with impunity. The Soviets won't come in to block us. And we've got five, maybe 10, years to clean up these old Soviet surrogate regimes like Iraq and Syria before the next superpower emerges to challenge us...".
And so Congress fell in line. In the invasion alone, anywhere from over 7,000 to 45,000 died. Under 250 of those were the invaders (and Kurdish rebels who joined them). Over seven thousand deaths because of 9/11, in a country with nothing to do with 9/11. (Similarly, the Taliban may have harboured al-Qaeda, but most Afghans had nothing to do with them.)
There and in Afghanistan, the US would improve conditions, especially for women and in rural areas, for years and years. These improvements could never reach the 270,000, minimum, killed in Iraq, or the 150,000, minimum, killed in Afghanistan, not to mention the 10,000 Americans dead. Three 9/11s worth of Americans. Fifty worth of Afghans. Ninety worth of Iraqis.
The point here is not to demean or debase the horror of 9/11. We honour all the victims and we think of their living loved ones today. The point is that war is hell, and we choose when and where to unleash it on Earth. (Clark also alleges that, after 9/11, Pentagon officials planned regime change in an astonishing seven different countries, to be invaded over five years.) War creates untold numbers of massacres and tragedies. The greatest tragedy is that, at the same time, the sheer scale, and the normalisation of violence warfare trades in, means that we lose sight of almost all those tragedies.
The improvements made are still real, and some will last. But girls will not be able to continue going to school now that the Taliban is back in power. The United States has never proven its reliability as a long-term military partner. The US military conducts itself with shock and awe, and then tires out quickly, rather than investing in the slow, hard effort to understand and overcome local obstacles. It is that exact lack of focus and determination that drove the US to abandon Afghanistan as the centerpiece of the “War on Terror” after only a couple years, to split their efforts in Iraq. That is the difference between them and the Taliban, and that is why they lost the war.
Compared to Afghanistan, the only time NATO has ever come to the defense of a member, Iraq was a near-unilateral invasion. John Kerry, the 2004 Democrat candidate against George Bush, pointed out only the UK and Australia had joined the US. Dubya did not exactly reassure when his defence against this charge was that Kerry forgot Poland.
In case you’ve forgotten, countries aren’t supposed to invade countries, except in exceptional circumstances like prevention of genocide. Saddam had conducted ethnic cleansing against Kurds in the past, but by this point, he was at his least dangerous, saber-rattling abroad while dismantling his putative chemical weapons program at home. Bush nevertheless sought reelection as defender of America, and beat Vietnam veteran John Kerry and his three Purple Hearts. (Kerry wasn’t helped by becoming the first of a long succession of politicians who had to embarrassingly recant on their vote for the Iraq War.)
Current reflection on 9/11 is inextricably bound up with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the USA’s long-term exhaustion with war. The other side of that coin is that, in the short-term, Americans love war. There has never been a war that the majority of Americans have opposed in its first couple years. (That being said, Gallup polls indicate majority opposition to Iraq by summer 2005, and Congressional Republicans were punished heavily in the 2006 elections. That probably sets a new record for how quickly the US has changed its mind.)
It’s too late by then. The US is sunk waist-deep in the big muddy, and in that situation, the sunk cost fallacy takes over. The big fool Bush said to push on in 2007. Troop numbers in Iraq rose by around a third. This surge did help to reduce net violence in the short term. The issue is that this is the exception to the rule: most times the generals demand more troops, their deployment escalates and worsens the conflict.
As a coda to this dismally awful era of leadership, which has few parallels in modern human history, the US crashed the global economy in 2008. I don’t pin sole blame on the 2000s Republicans - they, their 90s predecessors, and Democrats had all collaborated in removing Depression-era protections, only to act shocked when nothing failed to prevent a second Great Depression.
Thankfully, it wasn’t as bad, in part thanks to the US government cracking on with a stimulus package of government-backed spending. The issue was that this stimulus wasn’t nearly as large as it needed to be. Compare the $800 billion bill then to the $1.9 billion bill Biden and the Democrats passed for COVID, which we can now see has created a far less severe or lasting economic crisis. Why?
Despite a second electoral massacre in two years, Republicans were still able to work with moderate Democrats to sabotage any larger bill. Their justification was the size of the debt. Bush blew up deficits massively to fund his tax cuts and his wars. The US had borrowed too much for his pet projects to feel comfortable relying on much more for a rainy day.
The long-term leadership repercussions of 9/11 really become clear here. With and without 9/11, you probably have President Bush from 2001 to 2009 and a Democrat President from 2009 on. However, it is practically indisputable that who that Democrat President would be was determined eight years beforehand by a handful of terrorists.
Hillary Rodham Clinton brought decades of experience, her fundraising and personnel connections from her husband's administration, and the enthusiasm she inspired as a feminist champion to the campaign. However polarising the public found her, she would have been just about guaranteed to win the primary, and then, by campaigning to fix the terrible economy, the presidency. One thing alone stopped her: she cast a vote for the Iraq War.
Community organiser Barack Obama had organised against the war. Now, as a fellow Senator with less experience and fewer establishment connections, he became her main opponent thanks to their contrasting stances, and beat somebody who seemed destined to be President. Obama won 53% of delegates to her 46%, which is enormously close by the standard of presidential primaries. Any factor could have changed the outcome.
Barack Obama took over for the second, and, in a sense, final, stage of the War on Terror. He had become a liberal hero, even as, in accepting his Nobel Peace Prize, he argued that the United States still possessed the right to unilaterally fight countries, and even as he claimed that “the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms”.
In some circles, you can’t say Obama and walk ten feet without somebody calling back “drone strikes!” in a twisted game of Marco Polo. Yes, he launched those into the highlands of Pakistan. He continued the wrong approach to the military-intelligence-political elites of that state. However, he certainly took the right approach towards his biggest headache in Pakistan: his support for a NAVY Seal operation, rather than a drone strike, slew Osama bin Laden without a single civilian casualty in the process.
Within a couple of years, violence rose in Afghanistan, particularly from IEDs. This is not his fault, and he pursued the appropriate decision in pivoting from “nation-building” to a counterinsurgency approach, massively drawing down troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sadly, this was only one step towards ending the “forever wars”; he failed to go the distance.
The final deathblow for hopes that democracy was now coming to the Middle East was the Arab Spring. This movement was hopeful and had so much potential, but only reached that democratic goal in Tunisia. By 2012, Obama had to treat Bashar al-Assad as a new Saddam, promising that gassing his own citizens was a “red line” that could not be crossed.
Putin had cooperated with the US against radical Islamist terrorism, but the relationship had grown hostile. He meddled to back Assad, that red line went unenforced, and many more thousands died. I have no glib conclusion here. Sometimes every option is terrible. The Middle East had been condemned, in the global eye, to wave after wave of destabilisation, with the hopes of her peoples going unheard.
As the Middle East (outside of Syria and Libya) cooled down, let us return to the USA. Concern had risen along with debt. The “Tea Party”, a political organisation predicated on opposition to high deficits and debt, rose and galvanized Republicans. Ted Kennedy died and prompted a special election. His Democrat successor in deep-blue, hippy-dippy liberal Massachusetts somehow blew it, getting just over seven thousand votes less than her Republican opponent and changing the balance of power in the Senate.
Obama was already more moderate than the moment called for. Now, most of his would-be reforms were dead in the water. That loss signalled bad news for Democrats. In Congressional elections November, Republicans massacred any final hopes that may have lingered on for real change. The USA was now set on a course of inertia, sinking ever deeper into a dark well where its economy was leaving millions of people exposed out in the open, it could not afford to care for the vulnerable, and nor did its leaders care to.
George Romney was a conservative Mormon who nevertheless marched with the civil rights movement, worked against the pervasive confinement of Black Americans to ghettos, and opposed the Vietnam War. His son Mitt had seemed at first cut from the same cloth: he was another Republican who had won election in Massachusetts years ago, and there he implemented health reforms awfully similar to Obamacare. That is the case precisely because Obamacare was based on Romneycare, as a good example of how to expand healthcare.
Naturally, in order to become the 2012 Presidential candidate against Obama, Mitt totally renounced his signature work there, and instead repeated all the modern mantras: even though deficits and debts were exploding, and he was very very concerned about that, he wanted to cut government revenues further and dial up military spending and operations.
Obama was an incumbent and fresh President and the economy was recovering. He won, but that election was closer than it ever should have gotten. He almost had another challenger: socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders considered running against him. Obama had come a long way from Bush, but he was still too hawkish overseas, and not committed enough to reform and expenditure at home.
The final throes of the “War on Terror” came with ISIS. They came, they saw, they were conquered. They ought to remind us of how recently everyday Muslims were and are still being conflated with radical Islamists as an international menace. Muslims are still compelled to dissociate from their actions, apologise for their communities, and defend themselves as if they have anything in common in radical Islamists, or any suspicion falling on them is justified, a sinister form of blatant profiling.
The horrors of ISIS overshadowed homegrown success in the Middle East. Years ago, the US had overseen the election of the first democratic leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2014, the new states witnessed the first peaceful transfers of power. Even amidst rising violence and dysfunction, corruption and fraud, that was proven possible by Afghans and Iraqis.
And so we come to the third and final time in sixteen years that an electoral fluke screws us all. (I say us all because political and economic events in the United States determine how much action they take on global issues like terrorism and climate change, setting the bar in turn for other countries.)
Hillary Clinton was again weakened, by all of the same elements that enabled Sanders’ rise. She had spent four years as Secretary of State, in an administration that had done too little to get out of wars overseas and fix matters at home. I say that even though I typically detest that nationalist tagline. To be clear, countries can walk domestically and chew gum internationally at the same time; the gum just shouldn’t be drone strikes.
On the Republican side, the usual trumpeting and fanfare over being “strong on defense” proliferated. Donald Trump was for a Muslim ban, for bombing in Middle Eastern countries. And yet he stood out from the field on how surprisingly isolationist he was. Republican voters would never accept such softness...and yet they loved it. Americans were sick of the wars overseas, and sick of the cost.
The naked xenophobia and racism on display around the Trump campaign revealed a lot. The debt mattered because of the excuse that number offered: to do less and less for the international community, and for fellow Americans in need.
The election of an isolationist Republican over an unusually hawkish Democrat spelled doom for any intervention in Afghanistan and in Iraq, even if Trump took his time about it. By the 2020 election, withdrawal under either candidate was a foregone conclusion. Biden was relatively dovish in the Obama administration, and he prioritised the Afghan withdrawal as one of his first acts.
In the 1960s, the “Great Society”, a set of programs fighting the War on Poverty, were slashed in order to afford the Vietnam War. Today, the war abroad has been the first to go. Ironically, at home, debt seems to be less important than ever.
The fiscal cost seems to have been all that really swayed people. The loss of military personnel was, of course, tragic. Yet, in terms of really moving the needle against futile and senseless war, their deaths never seem to have mattered as much as they should. One of the hardest realities the USA needs to look itself in the eye about is how it worships human sacrifice on the altar of “national defense”.
One veteran interviewed earlier this year spoke of “the American public's both respect and, ultimately, indifference to what the American military is doing overseas. I think what the public needs to realize is that engagement and criticism of the military is required for respecting the military, because if you're not engaged and you don't know enough about it to criticize what the military is doing, that means you don't care enough to actually understand what it's doing. Because it is an institution like any others that makes mistakes, has bureaucratic inertia and is prone to failure without sustained oversight, both from our politicians and from American taxpayers.”
The most disturbing part of reflecting on the twenty-year war is the way in which actual conditions for Afghans and Iraqis are spoken about. Some of the soldiers who were there on the ground, and some everyday people, seem to care. The enthusiasm for receiving Afghan refugees in even the USA, let alone other countries like Canada, has surprised and warmed me, just as our own muted tone has been a disappointment.
Yet listen to how American politicians and generals and bureaucrats talk about improved conditions in Afghanistan. It seems nakedly obvious what they really care about. It’s not the people. They just want to trumpet how good the US is at everything it does. That is the way to power, in a country where admitting you could do better or apologising is a heresy.
The United States of America is undoubtedly very good at killing scores of people, and it thinks and prays that they are terrorists. The terrible irony of the past twenty years is that, in response to an awful demonstration of how a few people can kill so many, the US has proven its own ability to do the same time and again, and yet its methods ensure it will never win an asymmetric war.
The United States of America is no good at nation-building and, mercifully, they finally seem to have gotten the message on that. From here, we will have to see where Afghans and Iraqis take their own countries. Past efforts in both have been mixed: reformers have contended with ideological extremists. For over four decades now, both have been at near-constant war within or without.
Provided the Taliban are telling the truth about the fall of the little lion in Panjshir valley, that country may now get a chance at peace, and Iraq has basically been at rest for a few years. To my knowledge, there is no violence on the border of secessionist Iraqi Kurdistan, and ISIL has been reduced to occasional murderers. The rebuilding may redouble, but it is unclear if leadership in either country will take them forwards any time soon.
The United States of America is no good at self-reflection. Culturally and systematically, the country just isn’t set up to admit fault, take the blame, and figure out how to do things better next time. We can be about as confident as it gets that there won’t be another 9/11. Airport security is now sensible, security in the West is far more advanced today, and multiple anniversary attacks have been foiled. If one should be planned for the 20th anniversary, I am confident it will fail.
I have no such confidence that the USA won’t war a fourth time: a fourth Vietnam, a fourth Afghanistan, a fourth Iraq. So many bodies have been left behind. Osama bin Laden got what he wanted. He won. The terrorists won. The USA lost the war. No ifs, no buts, that's how it is.
Biden's language on the Kabul bombing sounded just like Bush twenty years ago. What is to say another country will not be in the crosshairs in another decade or two? The Middle East is not the only region to come within the crosshairs. The Clinton administration launched bombs in an attempt to attack al-Qaeda in Sudan. Insurgents have threatened countries as far afield as the Philippines. And this only speaks to the threat of radical Islamists, not of various other entities and actors out there, not to mention great power antagonism.
The United States of America is very good at commemorating her dead, and grieving over loss. I admire their dedication to those lost on 9/11, and I wish that passion extended wholly to surviving first responders still suffering. What I want to see is that energy applied to remembering victims of war, all victims, be they American, Afghan, Iraqi, others.
But that is just a dream. I am not American and neither is my audience. Here in New Zealand, then, we should not forget we were a part of the War in Afghanistan, too. We were far less significant, in the grand scope of things, but some of our military killed civilians, with bullets and with unexploded ordnance, and some of our personnel died.
Until today, I must confess I thought the context around John Key’s infamous declaration on the War on Terror was a lot worse. He was only sending non-combat personnel, and to aid in the fight against ISIS. But the mentality that compelled him to scream “get some guts and join the right side” at the Opposition was absolutely the wrong one. We can not permit that sort of blind nationalism to infect New Zealand.
The simple, sickening fact of the matter is that too many of us still conflate “shooting the bad guys” with strength, with moral rightness, with good outcomes. That ignores how many civilians get caught in the crossfire, how bad militaries have proven at determining who the bad guys are, and how ending lives does not equate to women’s rights, or democracy, or better standards of living.
So, then, my reflection for my fellow New Zealanders: there is nothing unpatriotic about demanding to know why we are going to fight a war. There is nothing that disrespects soldiers in querying if they are being trained and instructed and sent to do the right thing. There is nothing good in war for the sole sake of fighting the bad guys, without a wider purpose.
We are a little country, and we cannot tip the balance of war. No matter what, we could not determine the outcome of the War in Afghanistan, or the War in Iraq. We could not even alter the dynamics. To quote another American veteran, “Your unit isn't going to do it. You aren't going to do it. But it's about finding that one little piece and how you can shape the world and make it better.”
We can tend to our corner of the garden. We can make the difference to some lives, and the real thing we must remember is that every life is precious and every one matters, whatever their country of birth, whichever conflict they happen to be caught within.
That applies, too, to every Muslim, every Arab, every Kurd and Pashtun and any other person who makes their home here. Say no to surveillance, say no to the blame game, listen to what they ask for and hear their own pain. The wrong of oppression in our beautiful society cannot right the wrongs of terrorism, or make us any safer. It can only satisfy our paranoia, for a time, until we come up with the next, yet more exorbitant idea for how we can turn on families from the Middle East and make them unwelcome here.
We can do all of this right. We can live in ever more peace and harmony, and make sure all of those who have died did not do so in vain. Let that be what we take away as we think of nearly three thousand people going about their daily routine one bright morning in New York. Their lives were taken away senselessly and brutally and in terrifying fashion. Let there meaning, worth, learning in their passing. May they be at rest and at peace.
If the sky that we look upon
Should tumble and fall
Or the mountains should crumble to the sea
I won't cry, I won't cry
No, I won't shed a tear
Just as long as you stand,
Stand by me
-Ben E. King
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