Published on The Smirking Chimp (http://www.smirkingchimp.com)
The Day That Changed Everything Wasn't 9/11
By Ira Chernus
Created Sep 11 2006 - 9:03am
Yes, it changed everything -- not September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers
collapsed, but November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and left the U.S.
at sea, drifting without an enemy in a strange new world.

Through four decades of the Cold War, Americans had been able to feel
reasonably united in their determination to fight evil. And everyone, even
children, knew the name of the evildoers: "the commies." Within two years
after the Wall fell, the Soviet Union had simply disappeared. In the U.S.,
nobody really knew how to fight evil now, or even who the evildoers were.
The world's sole remaining superpower was "running out of demons," as Colin
Powell complained.

Amid the great anguish of September 11, 2001, it was hard to sense the
paradoxical but very real feeling of relief that flooded across the country.
After a decade adrift with no foes to oppose, Americans could sink back into
a comfortingly black-and-white world, neatly divided into the good guys and
the bad guys, the innocent and the guilty. In the hands of the Bush
administration, "terrorists," modest as their numbers might have been,
turned out to be remarkably able stand-ins for a whole empire-plus of
"commies." They became our all-purpose symbol for the evil that fills our
waking nightmares.

Today the very word "terrorist" conjures up anxiety-ridden images worthy of
the Cold War era -- images of an unpredictable world always threatening to
spin out of control. As then, so now, sinister evil is said to lurk
everywhere -- even right next door -- always ready to spring upon
unsuspecting victims.

Historians, considering the last decades of our history, are well aware that
millions of Americans didn't need the attacks of 9/11 to fear that their
world was spinning out of control. As the Cold War waned, profound
differences on "values" issues (previously largely kept under wraps) came
out of the closet. Societal anxiety rose. Many wondered how long a nation
could endure if it had no consensus on "moral matters" and no obvious
authority figures to turn to. Many feared they would lose their moral anchor
in an increasingly confusing and challenging world.

This was the real terror that the Bush administration played upon when the
Twin Towers fell. It took no time at all for the President to be right on
Manichaean message: "We've seen [1] that evil is real." "It is enough [2] to
know that evil, like goodness, exists." He did not have to say the rest
explicitly, because (with a sigh of relief and endless rites of ceremonial
mourning) Americans understood it: Goodness exists here in the good old USA.
How do we know? Because evil itself attacked us and we are so firmly
committed to fighting it.

Such circular logic fed public discourse from the springs of a deeply buried
unconscious longing for power, clarity, and innocence. Once again we could
stand tall in the world, the dazzling hyperpower of hyperpowers. As long as
we were fighting evil, we had to be the good guys. If we weren't so good,
why would we be so determined to fight the supposedly new evil of global
terrorism?

Of course, it worked the other way around, too: The only way to prove that
we were good was by hunting out and fighting evil. If we were to keep on
feeling certain that we were the good guys, a steady supply of bad guys was
a necessity -- and the post-Cold War decade just hadn't done its job
providing them. So it could easily seem more appealing to launch a
generational Global War on Terror that would keep the "terrorists" around
permanently. What better way to keep on proving our virtue than by combating
and containing them forever?

The New Normalcy

The neoconservatives understand all this perfectly well -- and well before
September 11, 2001. For years, they had dreamed of preserving American
virtue (and American global dominance) by flaunting American military might.
They just needed an ongoing series of excuses to do the flaunting. The
attacks of 9/11 gave them their chance.

Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice (all products of the Cold
War era) said it clearly in the weeks following the attack. Their new war
would not be a straightforward World War II-style march to victory. It would
be more like. well, the war they knew, the Cold War, with its endless string
of conflicts, crises, containments, and battles in the frontier lands of
what used to be called the Third World. And it would be forever.

As Cheney put it, "There's not going [3] to be an end date when we're going
to say, 'There, it's all over with.'" And he classically summed things up
[4] this way: "Many of the steps we have now been forced to take will become
permanent in American life. . I think of it as the new normalcy.'' The
neocons were glad to see the war on terrorism revive memories of the days
when -- they imagine -- we contained the commies, learned to stop worrying,
and loved the bomb (despite all its terror).

It was a strange love that they remembered so fondly. Polls made it clear
that we never really stopped worrying then -- and polls make it clear that
we still haven't now. Now, as then, we just bury the terror ever deeper and
console ourselves as best we can with the mercilessness of our enemies and
the relative safety of our own neck of the woods.

A recent poll [5] tells us that only 14%% of Americans feel safer now than
they did five years ago. Seventy-nine percent expect another attack on U.S.
soil within the next year, and 60%% think it's likely in the next few months.
Four out of five say that "we will always have to live with the threat of
terrorism," though only one in five admits to being "personally very
concerned about an attack" in his or her own area. A Florida woman captured
the prevailing mood when she told a reporter: "When I stop to think about
it, I don't feel very safe. But then again, on a day-to-day basis, I feel
fine." As Rep. Peter King [6], chair of the House Homeland Security
Committee, put it: "It's like we live in two parallel existences."

Those words should sound awfully familiar to anyone who lived through the
Cold War years. The war on terrorism has revived the Cold War mindset, in
which we are all citizens of a national insecurity state. The terror of
impending annihilation from a vast, conspiratorial, and evil enemy has again
become the vague backdrop of everyday life. To assure ourselves of our
absolute goodness, we must see the enemy as absolute evil; not a collection
of human beings bent on harming us, but a network of monsters bent on -- and
capable of -- destroying us utterly. In other words, Cheney's "new normalcy"
is but a version of an older, deeper apocalyptic terror. Every loss -- of a
diplomatic conflict or an economic tussle or a pair of skyscrapers -- is
once again framed as a portent of looming doom for the nation. Any
successful attack upon us, we are told, could bring down the curtain of
Armageddon.

Here's the irony. Unlike the nuclear-armed Soviet Union in the Cold War
years, terrorists cannot actually threaten to obliterate our country or
destroy the planet. But each apocalyptic warning of war to the death by the
Bush administration only hastens another kind of loss -- the loss of the
American imperial power they so prize.

Cornered Empire?

Even if actual extinction doesn't threaten, when it seems to, a nation, like
an animal, is tempted to fight back with no holds barred. That's the
attitude Bush and the neocons have tried to inculcate since 9/11. It's the
only attitude, they insist, that can save America's military might and moral
fiber. Indeed, for hard-core neocons, the main point of their
global-war-on-terror policies is to revive this very Cold War mentality.

Yet those policies have obviously backfired terribly. The war on terrorism
was supposed to build a new American century -- a unipolar world in which
the U.S. would reign supreme. But every day it looks more and more like the
21st century will be the multipolar century, with any number of powerful
nations and regional groupings successfully challenging U.S. economic,
diplomatic, and military preeminence.

Bush and his neocon advisors certainly don't bear all the blame for an
American imperial decline. But their utter misreading of the nature of U.S.
military power and their lack of interest in economic and diplomatic
realities has certainly hastened along a process that, in some fashion, was
bound to happen anyway.

The United States reached the peak of its power in the late 1940s. The
meat-grinder of World War II had chewed up all the other great powers and
their colonial empires, too. In the ensuing decades, as the others recovered
and once-dominated nations like China and India broke free and gained
traction, the world moved inevitably toward a multipolar future.

Cold war presidents from Truman to Reagan hastened the process by building
up U.S. allies like Germany and Japan in order to stave off the evil empire.
And they sometimes even heeded the call of those allies to refrain from
using military force (or too much of it anyway), lest a global war be
triggered. Empowering our allies, while keeping them militarily subservient,
actually helped them grab a bigger slice of the global economic pie,
encouraging the rise of multipolarism. Big mistake, the neocons declared as,
after 9/11, they set the Bush administration on an aggressive course of
unilateralism, aiming at their dream of a New-Rome-style unipolarism.

Looking back, it's easy to see what a big mistake they made -- even in their
own terms. Their unilateralism and militarism accelerated to near warp speed
the decline of U.S. power and influence around the world. Every military
blow or threatened blow only multiplied American enemies; every
shock-and-awe action only created more opposition, even from increasingly
standoffish allies. In the years to come, for an economically weakened "last
superpower," there will be more and more occasions, on more and more fronts,
when the U.S. will meet its match and have to back down. None of these will
spell doom for us. But in context of the national insecurity state, they're
likely to be framed as apocalyptic defeats, harbingers of the end time
itself, and, above all, good reason to fight back blindly with all our
might.

This is the vicious circle from Hell. The Bush administration's aggressive
policies weaken U.S. power. Then its officials try to frighten the public
into supporting the very same aggressive policies. We were stuck in a
similar cycle, only half-recognized, throughout the Cold War years, and
there's no end in sight. So far, it looks like not much has changed at all
since 9/11.

But we don't have to stay stuck. There's nothing inevitable about history.
Some 160 years after the French Revolution, Chinese Prime Minister Zhou
Enlai was asked how that event had changed the world. "It's too soon to
tell," Zhou replied impishly. Five short years after 9/11, it's way too soon
to tell if the attacks of that day actually "changed everything," or if they
changed much of anything at all.

Already, there is a growing awareness that the Bush Global War on Terror is
doing more harm than good. Even from the foreign policy elite we can hear
(though still often faintly) voices saying [7] it's time to call it off. For
now, the talk is narrowly focused on our imperial well-being -- the
weakening of U.S. power and interests around the world.

Perhaps, as losses mount, Americans will eventually see the more important
truth: Simplistic moralism and a pervasive fear of apocalyptic disaster
weaken our society here at home. They make every step toward positive change
look like a looming danger and that plays right into the hands of
conservatives who are dedicated to preventing the change we need so badly.
If the failed war on terror eventually teaches us this lesson, 9/11 will
turn out to be the day that did indeed change everything.

Copyright 2006 Ira Chernus

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson