Sept.-Oct. 2002:
9/11 One Year Later...
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9/11 One Year Later . . .

by David McReynolds

hose of us living in New York City have a different view of September 11 than does the country at large. My sense was that New Yorkers were less bent on vengeance (and more in a state of shock) than was the rest of the country. It was a stunning tragedy—not only were more than 2,000 people killed, but they died so swiftly, and were for the most part vaporized and pulverized so totally, that there were no body parts to collect, identify, and bury. Memorials that take place in New York City are in order.

In New York and for the nation as a whole, however, it is time to measure how much has changed—and why September 11 didn’t happen sooner. That is, to start at the beginning, the United States has inflicted so much horror on so many parts of the world, from Latin America to Africa to the Middle East to Asia, that one need not believe in the concept of karma to wonder why the millions of bits of tragedy and pain did not find some expression sooner. This is not to justify terror but only to understand its roots. It is nonsense to call this approach “anti-Americanism,” like calling dissenting Germans of the 1930s “anti-German” because they felt that Hitler was out of step with the best of German history.

Of course September 11 was not the fault of those at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and on the hijacked flights. But it was arrogant of our leaders to think a violent foreign policy would not eventually “blow back.” September 11 was a direct result of U.S. policies that made Afghanistan and the Middle East a battleground and funded, trained and equipped any militant Muslim who would do battle against the Soviets. Those in Washington who thought they were using the Islamic militants simply as tools of U.S. policy never understood that many of the mujahadin hated the United States as much as they hated the Soviets.

While pacifists know our voices are rarely heard in high places, they do, nonetheless, need to be heard. September 11 was a wonderful opportunity for the U.S. corporate state to realize “a different world is possible,” rather than rush to battle in Afghanistan and elsewhere. We never saw proof that Bin Laden was actually responsible for the World Trade Center bombing. There is no question he was involved in other attacks on U.S. symbols abroad. But Bush never released documents clearly linking Bin Laden, the Taliban or Afghanistan to the attack. For those of us who believe we must seek peaceful and nonviolent means of resolving conflict, September 11 was a reason to speak more clearly, not to be silenced.

What did happen was that Bush (or, to be more accurate, his right-wing advisers) took the nation in a troubling and fearful direction, in the course of which we saw two things made very clear that had not previously been visible. First, while Bush lost the election and therefore should have entered the White House on tiptoe (if at all), he acted as if he had a mandate. He installed the extreme right wing—Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General John Ashcroft and their friends in the seats of real power. In the year since the event, Secretary of State Colin Powell has been isolated in the administration, the Departments of State and the Pentagon have been outmaneuvered by Rumsfeld, and Cheney still has his hand on the rudder as he darts from one secret location to another.

The administration had already shown a penchant for secrecy and unilateralism in its policies, but after the World Trade Center tragedy, Bush used the fear of terrorism to lead us toward a foreign policy conducted not only independently of allies, but often in direct opposition and defiance of them. (Various schemes have even been floated around the administration about invading Saudi Arabia and taking control of the oil fields.) The proposed attack on Iraq is designed to secure further U.S. control of oil resources in the Middle East, and has absolutely nothing to do with alleged weapons of mass destruction or human rights in Iraq.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union stood as a kind of check and balance vis-a-vis Washington (as this country did vis-a-vis Moscow), but with the collapse of the Soviet Union there are no checks. Neither the enemies of the United States nor its closest allies have any influence on Bush’s policies. (The only country that seems able to defy Bush, ignore his advice and run things as it will, is Israel, which, for its independent spirit, will again be rewarded with a huge basket of economic and military aid.) What had been invisible to many, now became visible to all. The United States is a rogue state, bound by no international treaties or laws, by no alliances or regard for world opinion. There are those in Washington who feel the United States should recognize that it is an empire and behave with all the ruthlessness of the empires that came before (ah, and where are those empires now?).

The second thing that has changed is that the Bush fetish for conducting government in secret expanded after September 11. Ashcroft treats the Bill of Rights as toilet paper. People by the hundreds were picked up without a release of their names, without a trial. The administration is trying to push a program of domestic informers (“TIPS”) that is terrifyingly reminiscent of the old East German secret police.

Terrorism has been used as a blunt weapon against the nation as a whole, so that people are fearful of flying, the airports take forever to get through, and Ashcroft has a “color-coded” system of warnings. Bush’s advisers are using that excuse in foolish and dangerous ways. Any hope of change in Iran was set back when it was listed as part of the new Bush “axis of evil.” Dialogue with North Korea was also set back. As for Iraq, its affairs are for those who live there to settle, not for Rumsfeld and his “warriors of the desk” (few of the hawks in this administration saw military service in Vietnam).

Other things have also changed in this past year. While September 11 momentarily diverted attention from Enron and the fact that the oilmen are running the country, subsequent extraordinary corporate collapses and revelations about CEO involvements in criminal corporate activities have gone far to undermine the legitimacy of the administration. Our recession deepened and may result in a Democratic win in November. (Although when it comes to foreign policy, the Democrats are hardly differentiable from the Republicans. Willing to criticize anything but foreign policy, they are in the hands of the military contractors, afraid of being called “soft,” and so, lily-livered and fearful, they abandoned foreign affairs to the right-wing Republicans, leaving many of our old opponents, such as Henry Kissinger, to say the kinds of things about the pending Iraq invasion that the Democratic leadership should have been saying. It is a sad time indeed when the sole moderate in the Bush cabinet is a former general.)

There is an opening here for a citizens’ movement (not one based on conspiracy theories, and not one filled with pedantic left-wing jargon) to do from below what the political leadership at the top is not willing to do from the top: to challenge the Bush administration root and branch, from its efforts to suppress civil liberties to its contempt for international law, from its hostility to the environment to its contempt for the poor and the people who work for an honest living. In a nation suddenly restrained by no delicate balance of foreign interests, we, the citizens, need to speak, demonstrate, dialogue, and act. For the last year Bush has had it very much his way. The worst sin, the most un-American thing we can do, is to act as if we had no voice and no hope of changing the course of the nation.

David McReynolds was on the staff of the WRL National Office from 1960 to 1999 and is now a member of the League’s Executive Committee.