What September 11 really meant
By Jack Lessenberry
Created Sep 13 2006 - 11:06am
You've been sold a vast amount of nonsense about what the terrorist attacks
of Sept. 11 really meant. That is to say, why they happened, what caused
them, how we should have reacted, and what really changed.

Like most empires in decline, we increasingly love anniversaries. This was
the fifth, and unless you've been in a mineshaft in the Malagasy Republic,
you can't help but have noticed that our politicians and media have been
indulging in an orgy of wallowing in the memories of Sept. 11, 2001.

Every last relative of every last victim spent the week in grave danger of
being dragged before some camera. Dubya desperately seized the opportunity
to try to restore his plummeting popularity, visiting crash sites, wrapping
himself in the flag, hoping people overlook the fact that he never managed
to deliver on his promise to bring Osama bin Laden to justice.

Hoping, especially, that they wouldn't figure out that he has made the world
a much more dangerous place for us, especially in the long run, than it was.
He may be a divider and a dyslexic, but he ain't a quitter: Gamely, Bush
minor tried once again to convince the folks that the insane war he plunged
us into in Iraq is necessary and justified by his great mystical war on
terror.

Alas, the polls show they increasingly ain't buying it. And humiliatingly,
his fellow Republicans are starting to mostly avoid their president like the
plague.

This is, after all, an election year, and President Bush is slightly less
popular these days than Kaposi's sarcoma. When the Shrub showed up in
Michigan last week, the only prominent GOPster who wanted to be near him was
the man he was raising funds for, Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard, the
underdog challenger to U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow.

Privately, Republicans think control of the House of Representatives is
probably gone. One GOP congressman told me he expected a loss of 30 seats.
For the first time, even losing the U.S. Senate is starting to seem a
possibility.

Back, however, to Sept. 11 itself.

Five years after the terrorist attacks, the media, especially the broadcast
media, and especially the cable news networks - went utterly bananas.

Documentary after documentary, interview after interview. The newspapers
were more restrained, but still ground out vapid stories about the Day That
Changed Everything. In one of the more bizarre of these, Mitch Albom even
appeared to be channeling the corpse of Bob Talbert at his worst.

"We miss when toothpaste was not considered a weapon ... we miss
simplicity," Mitch wept. Brush 'em anyway, big guy, and suit up.

There were major exceptions, such as Frank Rich's brilliant piece in
Sunday's New York Times. And then there was the piece that did say it all.

That is the September/October Foreign Policy magazine cover story, "The Day
Nothing Much Changed," written by its managing editor, William J. Dobson. In
four illustrated pages there is more truth than you could find in four years
of TV news. Dobson demonstrates "what is remarkable is how little the world
has changed," since Sept. 10, 2001. "The forces of globalization continue
unabated; indeed, if anything, they have accelerated. The issues of the day
that we were debating on that morning in September are largely the same."

The global economy was little affected; the U.S. economy bounced back fast.
Americans are now traveling abroad more often than they were in 2001. Our
government is issuing the same numbers of student visas; letting in almost
as many immigrants. As the newspaper headlines just before the towers fell
indicate, our national preoccupations, stem cell research, Israel-Arab
confrontations, worrying about Iran's nuclear capability - are much the
same.

Yes, it was "theatrical terrorism of the worst kind." Nobody over the age of
6 or so on Sept. 11 will ever forget those images. Yet as Frank Rich noted,
"the new normal lasted about 10 minutes, except in airport check-ins."

But there indeed was a day which changed everything - a day which we have
now forgotten, didn't pay enough attention to at the time, and without which
the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, could never have happened.

That day was Dec. 31, 1991.

For what happened on that day was far more significant. Quietly, without
fanfare, the Soviet Union finished dissolving itself, going out of business
and upsetting the world order that had existed since the end of World War
II.

From that moment on, the United States was the sole superpower ... "and from
that moment on, the world was out of balance - and it still is," Dobson, a
lawyer and longtime journalist covering international relations, writes.

That is why the United States was a target - there was no other game in
town. Prior to the fall of the Soviet Union, Osama bin Laden had been far
more concerned with Moscow than with Washington. Then, in the 1990s, Osama
and his al Qaeda tried to overthrow various Arab regimes in the Middle East.

Those efforts were all colossal failures. So, "unable to accomplish his
objectives in the Arab world, Osama bin Laden plotted to strike at the
faraway enemy, the United States ... the colossus that for decades had
helped shore up the bedrock of Arab regimes," the editor added.

That is what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

Today, the international system is even more out of whack than ever. There
was one major effect of the terrorist attacks - a soaring Pentagon budget, a
budget that was already huge before the first plane hit on that horrible
day.

Before the towers fell, the United States spent as much on military stuff as
the nations with the 14 next biggest military establishments - combined.

Last year, we outspent those countries by $116 billion. In part, that is due
to our colossal failure of a war and occupation in Iraq, and to a lesser
extent in Afghanistan.

Communism and dictatorship are ghastly things. But in terms of loss of life
and sheer misery, Yugoslavia, for example, was far better off under Marshal
Tito than in the wars and genocide that replaced Communism in the 1990s.

And it is perfectly clear that Iraq - and the United States - would have
been better off had Saddam remained in power.

The biggest tragedy of Sept. 11 is that it gave a narrow, ignorant,
accidental president an excuse to attack the wrong enemy in the wrong place
at the wrong time. Some other president, including the one the people wanted
to win the 2000 election, would have wiped out the Taliban, caught or killed
the maniac bin Laden, and brought at least partial closure to the mess he
began.

The tragedy, in the end, was far greater than the dead of the World Trade
Center, Pentagon and Flight 93 tragedies. The tragedy was that when the
attacks came, our country needed a statesman. What we got instead was a
Bush.

* * *

Helen Thomas rides again: Helen Thomas, the legendary White House reporter
turned columnist, will be the keynote speaker at the Oakland County
Democratic Party's annual Phil Hart Dinner this Sunday at the Troy Hilton
(phone 248-584-0510 for info). I'm not saying you ought to give money to the
Democrats, but I do think you ought to hear her speak if you haven't done
so. Besides telling the truth about the war right from the start, she is
inspiring on two grounds. She is a proud native Detroiter and has done some
of her best work since turning 80. (There may yet be hope for this column.)
_______

About author Jack Lessenberry opines weekly for Detroit's Metro Times.

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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