In the middle of an ideologically based war against an enemy that some would argue intended to destroy Western democracies, capitalism, and the ideals upon which America was founded, one wacked-out hippy had the audacity to invite the world to imagine a different kind of world, a world of peace, tolerance, and acceptance; in his words to "imagine all the people living life in peace... the world will live as one." Ironically, shortly thereafter a gunman put a bullet in his head, and it seems a dream died with him; an end of an era of soul searching and idealism that was John Lennon.
Today is the tenth anniversary of the tragic events of September 11, 2001 when some 3000 victims of various nationalities, citizenship, and religions lost their lives due to an attack by "Islamist Terrorists" a term used to identify a group of self-described revolutionaries bent on purifying the Islamic world of Western influence and restoring a medieval Islamic caliphate throughout the traditional Islamic Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and South Asian crescent. While a few Islamist mullahs did espouse broader worldwide ambitions, the main focus was on the medieval Islamic territories which predated Western colonization and territorial demarcation. America was not the target of the jealousy of impoverished stone age peoples lusting after American wealth and freedom as Bush shortly after 9/11 tragedy absurdly and naively declared, in his own words, "America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world." Rather America was attacked because American foreign policy has been instrumental in maintaining a system of oppression and impoverishment that pervades the post colonial Islamic world by direct economic exploitation of regional resources and by support of corrupt dictatorial regimes that actively and brutally suppress their own peoples. The truth is that we Americans are often hated in these third world parts because of our history of deception, exploitation, and at times violent intervention; including our political support of Israel, whose dismal human rights record in the takeover and homesteading of the Palestinian territory after the British receded in the 1940's, has instituted a decades long struggle between competing views of who did what first. More accurately, the attack on America was a strategic salvo to repress or destroy American infuence in the world in order to bring down the regional powers of the Islamic crescent in a worldwide revolution which these Islamists hoped would rise up in the aftermath. However, the religious and social basis and support for such a military take over of the Islamic crescent is dubious at best and universally denied by the majority of Islamic (and non-Islamic) peoples in the region. They may still resent American meddling and abuse (usually making a distinction between American policy and American people) in what they perceive to be helping to institutionalize their suffering and oppression, but most have no desire to replace one authoritarian state with another in the model of the repressive Afghani Taliban.
In the middle of another ideologically based war against an enemy that some would argue intended to destroy Western democracies, capitalism, and the ideals upon which America was founded, a contemporary of Lennon's would famously reimagine peace entirely in a great example of Orwellian Doublespeak stating, "I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace." The statement was made in 2002 by then president of the United States, George W. Bush, after having just gone into Afghanistan to ostensibly find and punish the leadership of Al-Qaida who claimed responsibility for the World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks on 9/11. Eventhough the Taliban had nothing to do with attacks and offered to gather up Osama Bin Laden with others in Al Qaida and send them off to be tried in a Muslim country, the Bush Administration reimagined the war as being against the Afghani Taliban which they argued had provided safe haven for the Al Qaida militants while they were preparing for the attack. Shortly after that Bush would reimagine the war on terror as including Iraq eventhough they also had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. When the original flimsiness of the Iraqi terrorist argument fell apart (though the propaganda was very effective as years later the majority of Americans still believed Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks), the Bush Administration invented the idea of a "preemptive strike" based on contrived and unfounded evidence of
Weapons of Mass Destruction which was firmly disputed by most regional experts including the inspectors who were on the ground in Iraq. Ultimately the predetermined invasion was architected by Bush's Neoconservative administration based on long standing principles laid out in their
Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century policy written in September 2000, which argued that:
We must restore the foundation of American security and the basis for U.S. military operations abroad... The current American peace will be short-lived if the United States becomes vulnerable to rogue powers with small, inexpensive arsenals of ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads or other weapons of mass destruction. We cannot allow North Korea, Iran, Iraq or similar states to undermine American leadership, intimidate American allies or threaten the American homeland itself. (p.75)
The document goes on to recognize that the Neoconservative policy of rebuilding American's military preeminence as the unchallenged superpower "is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor." (p. 51) This poorly veiled attempt to justify the predetermined military opportunism resulted in arguably the greatest public backlash in world history with as many as 36 million showing up to protest the impending invasion in the early months of 2003. Somewhere in the process "truth" took a bullet, lost in the middle of a war of propaganda and deceit to win a war that quickly lost track of the identified reasons that those who supported it, claimed justified it.
After ten years, however, the same ignorance that led us into this mess still pervades the public discourse in news, blogs, and commentaries. The great American philosopher and pacifist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, insightfully stated, "Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding." Yet, ten years in to this venture, Muslims are still viewed by many Americans as enemies of the good Christian American people in spite of the fact the Muslims are inclusive of the American social fabric making up around one percent of the populace and, moreover, very few of the one billion Muslims worldwide support the Islamist agenda. The fabled take over of America by Islamic fascists under Sharia law has paralleled a more real militant form of Christian fascism bent on taking over the American government enforcing a Christian fundamentalist agenda and practice in law and government conduct. The Islamic battle cry "God is Great" (Allah Akbar) has been supplanted with the Christian battle cry "God Bless America" in an overt attempt to weaponize God, invoking the Almighty to destroy one's avowed enemies. Hopefully there are many who have come to understand the facts of the struggle we face, to build bridges of tolerance and acceptance, but on the street level the evidence is that the American mob mentality is still ridiculously committed to the war propaganda that 9/11 was an attack on Christians by Muslims who envy America's freedom and want to take over the world, and furthermore, that all Muslims are hate-driven, co-conspirators. Any modest attempts to try to rebuild relations with the Muslim world by the current Obama Administration have been characterized as traitorous and un-Christian.
After ten years, then, are we any closer to peace? Mother Teresa once remarked, "If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other." Aside from the aforementioned distrust of all things Islam, America, today, is more divided internally than it has in decades, if not ever, with the rhetoric and propaganda reaching monumental proportions. Hatred fills the blogosphere with obfuscations, ignorance, and shameful accusations and attributions, with no light at the end of the tunnel. The clear leader in the demise of the American commons, is Fox News with their absurd self-description as "fair and balance" while unabashedly proclaiming their advocacy of what they describe as conservatism. Yet theirs is not a conservatism that is founded in Jeffersonian democratic ideals of respectful discourse yielding to a greater public good based on value judgments of a defined set of facts and evidence. Rather it is a authoritarian conservatism devoid of any intelligent discourse of conservative principles or respect for the majority of Americans that disagree with their perspective which they argue should be foisted upon the American system under the simple argument that "well the other side is wrong so we should just do it the right way, our way." As with all authoritarian propaganda their arguments are based on deliberate distortions of the facts to manipulate an emotional response to a crass compendium of juvenile name-calling, fear-mongering, and overt distortions of a polarized straw-man universe of their own disturbed creation. It incites a breakdown in civil discourse that preempts and prevents any discussion of the public good necessary for a democratic society. It condescends any attempt to find the obvious middle ground that benefits the majority of the citizenry while protecting minority rights. It is purely a world of "us and them," in the most ugly and despicable displays of partisanship and arrogance, in the aphoristic tradition of "cutting off one's nose to spite one's face" in which everybody loses.
Ten years ago, in the moments right after the attack, the world was for a moment unified in its resolution and disgust for the perpetrators who in many cases had killed many of their own nation's citizens in the World Trade Center. Those who were traditionally critical or even antagonistic of America throughout the Western and Islamic world were prepared to unite and cooperate with America in changing this unsavory world order that had just raised its ugly head. Sadly, Islamic terrorism probably could have been stopped dead in its tracks at that moment cutting off public and material support and bringing the perpetrators to justice through broad cross-national cooperation. But this was the defining moment that the Neoconservatives were waiting for to push forward their plans to build the military preeminence of the United States. This was quite literally their "Pearl Harbor" that justified the policies and programs they had been promulgating for years. In transforming the human tragedy into a political strategy, they alienated the world forum and instead justified the hatred upon which perpetrators were fueled, turning the perpetrators into heroes in many parts of the world as icons of resistance to American hegemony. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once remarked,
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction... The chain reaction of evil — hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars — must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
Ten years later, certainly many things have changed but we are still at war on two fronts. After years of torturing and humiliating thousands, the resentment burns deeper than ever. After trillions of dollars spent in support of our best and brightest military strategists, we have succeeded in boxing in the foes, killing many of their leaders including their chief leader Osama Bin Ladin. But even from the beginning it was known that this is not a winnable war; there is no final humiliation or domination of the enemy that ends in any peace treaty or resolution. The only exit strategy is to break the cycle of war and violence; to go back to the first few moments of the human tragedy of 9/11 and reclaim our common humanity. This was not an American tragedy although it effected us profoundly and deeply as a nation. But in the truest sense it was a human tragedy and horror that included victims from nearly every region of the world, a tragedy which we shared with the world; and which can only be resolved when we recognize that very connection to the world. Imagining the most basic quality of our shared human vulnerability--trust and respect. Imagining a world where all the people live life in peace; in the dream of which John Lennon spoke--"the world will live as one."
May God bless those who have striven to peacefully rebuild America's spirit and community through compassion, tolerance, and hope.
