9/11 Fear And Vengeance
Steve Javaherian
As we remember 9/11, we remember the American response to the attacks on the World Trade Towers in New York. The chaos resembled more like a national anxiety attack in which we imagined that our entire national security and way of life had come under a threat by a relatively small and stateless group of radical islamists. America declared a war for survival, and by doing so we became and behaved like them, angry, intolerant, ethnocentric, and resorted to violence to promote our ideology, just like they did. Vengeance was on our mind even-though we called it justice. We effectively altered parts of our constitution by illegal detentions, torture and abrogation of our sense of civil rights in exchange for an unclear cry of national security and safety.
And what price did we pay for it? Over six thousand American soldiers dead, double what had already perished in the Twin Towers. More than 200,000 American military ended up being diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries alone, of which many committed suicide, and many turned violent against their own family when they returned, close to one million Iraqis and Afghanis were reported killed between 2003 and 2013, which the vast majority were civilians. And the cost of three trillion dollars ($3,000,000,000,000) that could have been spent on health care, education or paying off national debt. All that money, of course, has been borrowed. What have we gained? Are we safer now from the terrorist attack than we were ten years ago? Did the radical Islamists really threatened our way of life? Is the world a safer place today? Did we bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanestan and the rest of the Middle East? What have we learned about ourselves? What other questions are left for a conscientious mind to ask?
Killing One Person Is Murder.
Killing 1000s Is Foreign Policy.
