Fwd: [ NOLA_C3_Discussion] The Day That Changed Everything Wasn't 9/11

[Guest guest]

---------- Forwarded message ----------

Ward Reilly <wardpeace

Sep 12, 2006 6:06 PM

[NOLA_C3_Discussion] The Day That Changed Everything Wasn't 9/11

cawi , NOLA_C3_Discussion ,

Bush_Be_Gone

Cc: vvaw, campcaseyalumni ,

vetsandsurvivorsmarch

 

 

The Day That Changed Everything Wasn't 9/11

 

By Ira Chernus

 

09/12/06 " TomDispatch.com " -- -- 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 that evil is real. " " It is enough 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 to be an end date when we're going to

say, 'There, it's all over with.' " And he classically summed things up 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 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, 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 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

 

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado

at Boulder. His latest book is Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War

on Terror and Sin. He can be contacted at chernus

 

Copyright 2006 Ira Chernus / TomDispatch.com