- A lot can happen in three years.
-
- In the United States since 9/11, about 4,000 children
died from child abuse and neglect; in more than 80 percent of cases, parents
were the perpetrators. About 36,000 Americans died from unnecessary surgery.
Another 21,000 died from medication errors in hospitals, along with another
60,000 from other errors in hospitals. Adverse reactions to prescription
drugs killed about 100,000. Roughly 10,000 Americans died from accidental
drowning. About 2,100 died from bicycle accidents. Homicidal Americans
killing other Americans took another roughly 60,000 lives. Suicide took
more than 90,000. Traffic deaths amounted to well over 120,000.
-
- Despite all of America's mayhem and death (more than
7,000,000 Americans died in the last three years, including the clearly
avoidable ones listed above plus hundreds of thousands not listed that
were at least in part avoidable), the subject of 9/11 is never allowed
to rest. About 3,000 Americans died on 9/11 in a spectacular act of hatred
and vengeance, carried out, so far as we know, by 19 men, all of whom were
themselves consumed.
-
- Those who attacked America certainly did not do so because
they hated democracy or rights, no matter what President Muffinmouth keeps
deliriously muttering. Likely, they would not even have understood such
concepts, coming as they did from cultures where conditions prevail comparable
to those of centuries ago in Europe. But anyone understands abuse and bullying,
and it is America's terrible, careless abuse of its wealth and power to
which they were violently responding.
-
- In a Congress which consistently fails to remedy America's
social ills, its members always disparaging sensible regulation and rules
to cover their abject political cowardice and bought-and-paid-for status,
it took no time to start a war, even though it was clear that no nation
had attacked the United States, and to pass legislation more repressive
than any possible regulation. Scene after scene of America's grunting,
spewing legislators resembled life imitating art in the form of a movie
for teen-agers, The Planet of Apes.
-
- Whoever was responsible for 9/11 beyond those who killed
themselves (America's press automatically attributes the act to al Qaeda,
a shadowy and rather small organization at best, although still no proof
has been offered), the U.S. responded by spending tens of billions of dollars
to invade two nations. Billions more were spent stuffing already-bloated
intelligence agencies like geese being prepared for pâté de
foie gras and cranking up the megawatts snapping and crackling through
the wires to the nation's military Frankenstein.
-
- The money wasted on killing and maiming in Iraq might
have done many fine things for the world. It might have built fine new
schools in every wretched ghetto and backwater across the United States.
It might have been used to launch an historic alternate-energy program,
bringing down costs dramatically for technologies such as solar cells,
contributing to the future well-being of all of humanity. Even a small
portion of it could have done some spectacular things for fundamental science
or medicine. Another small portion would have generously funded the simple
technologies used for bringing clean drinking water to parts of the Indian
subcontinent where arsenic and other compounds slowly poison millions year
after year. The possibilities are almost endless.
-
- But no, it all went to a destructive, psychotic fantasy
called the war on terror (and more specifically to invade a place where,
much as in the old Soviet Union, terror was never tolerated for a second).
It should be clear, there can be no such thing as a war on terror, because
terror is not a society or a regime or an army or even an ideology. Terror
is a violent response to severe grievances. You can work hard to track
down specific law-breakers and you can enhance security measures and you
can work to redress grievances - all these are reasonable and fitting things
to do - but there is no place or army that you can attack with any meaningful
purpose. Of course, that simple fact hasn't stopped America from instituting
vast new abuses in the name of fighting a war on terror. As with the country's
crusade against communism, the pointless violence reflects America's own
shibboleths, fears, and internal politics rather than meaningful policy.
American politics are so utterly poisonous and corrupted that the failure
of one party to commit some barbarism abroad automatically is used by the
other party as a visceral issue. When Bush speaks of a long-haul war against
terror, he really means a renewal of the same cycle of vicious domestic
politics with a new foreign bogeyman and new foreign victims.
-
- Estimates of civilians killed by American forces in Iraq
have been slow in coming. America's press shows almost no interest, perhaps
taking its lead from a government which doesn't want the subject mentioned.
But then, Daddy Bush never advertised how many he slaughtered in the brief,
first Gulf War he started with subtle winks and suggestions to Hussein.
It is certain that tens of thousands of pathetically-equipped conscripts
died under waves of B-52s whose carpet bombing on the desert sealed the
men in their own graves: cooked and packed underground by millions of pounds
of high explosive.
-
- Quite recently, an Iraqi group announced what may be
the best count in view of its language and network of contacts in every
part of the country. It spent months talking to everyone from gravediggers
to doctors, deliberately avoided counting military deaths, and came up
with 37,000 civilian killed.
-
- The immense suffering of a major part of the population
who, overnight, lost the means to earn a living must be added to America's
achievement, as well as the birth of violent resistance to occupation,
an excellent laboratory for developing future generations of terrorists,
and tidal waves of violent crime (things consistently under-reported in
the U.S. press). Independent observers in Europe, including many British
soldiers, have been taken aback by the violence and heavy-handedness of
America's occupation. The abuses documented in the published photos from
Abu Ghraib prison (and there are many others not published) show a small
part of what American soldiers have done. Consider one clear instance,
fairly typical according to witnesses in Iraq brave enough to speak up
and at least one Marine non-commissioned officer who has left the service,
the Pentagon-invented Battle of Samara. Headlined in America's press as
a remarkable American victory, it was actually a slaughter of scores of
civilians by sweltering, disgruntled, trigger-happy soldiers.
-
- Only devotees of the Orwellian fantasies of Fox News
and CNN and those who depend on Defense Department contracts for a living
(and, sadly, that is now a truly gigantic number in the U.S.) ever accepted
Bush's claims about Iraq. Recent American stories about "they knew,"
referring to the fact that Bush was informed by outsiders of the weak nature
of his claims, are bitterly amusing. The world was awash in good information
that told us Bush was lying before the invasion. It came from past weapons
inspectors, current weapons inspectors, Iraqi refugees, diplomats, national
leaders, and scrupulous journalists (a category that notably excluded employees
of the New York Times and Washington Post). As it always does, understanding
the truth required that essential skill, prized by courts everywhere, of
evaluating the credibility of each witness. In Bush's case, this was an
open-and-shut judgment for anyone with powers of observation. The man's
every word is shrill and hollow.
-
- America's stubborn refusal to think was broadcast to
the world in childish demonstrations of antipathy towards France - restaurant
owners pouring vintage wines down the drain - and, to a lesser extent,
Canada. Had Americans just listened to sane voices coming from outside
their nearly hermetically-sealed society, about 1,000 of their soldiers
now dead would be alive, taxpayers would be at least 100,000,000,000 dollars
richer, oil prices wouldn't be setting record highs, and the country would
not be facing a years-long burden in Iraq, something, by the way, that
is not going to change in the slightest if John Kerry is elected. (No one
should forget, although the Democratic candidate strains the meaning of
words to maintain otherwise, Kerry voted with the thumping, spewing gorillas
to launch the war).
-
- Of course, more Americans and others working for Americans
have died than the 1,000 or so soldiers. For in this disgraceful war, America
farmed-out substantial occupation duties to richly-paid private contractors
- people once known, before the dawn of political correctness, as mercenaries
or assassins. No effort is even made to keep track of how many of these
are killed although I doubt many people much care.
-
- Many small stories of 9/11 remain untold. I do not mean
the kind of mawkish-tabloid stories that will be featured on the anniversary,
but stories that help explain what happened afterward. One of mine concerns
an American woman I know who left her job that morning and frantically
raced around to gather her three children from schools and daycare and
take them home, just in case, any terrorists were going to sacrifice their
lives to send airliners hurling into rural Maine. Of course, the odds -
infinitesimally small as they were - were at least the same that any airliners
would crash near her house located in a more populated area. A deadly road
accident during her frenetic car trip was a far more likely outcome than
avoiding another hijacked plane crashing.
-
- The point of the story was repeated only recently in
testimony at Congressional hearings by members of "9/11 families,"
an American lobby group of professional victims, some of whom made flatly
ridiculous statements about the country being unprepared for another attack,
including Twilight Zone stuff about little Elizabeth or Kyle not being
able to play outside safely (Good God, one wishes such people could spend
one day with a miserable Iraqi family cooped up in a shattered apartment
surrounded by violence and ruin so that they truly understood what terror
is). Well, I do suppose a twenty-foot wall could be built around America
and all of its possessions and embassies abroad with all planes and boats
being required to stop outside for complete inspection, but in an age of
globalization and the huge economic gains being made from it, it does seem
an unpromising idea.
-
- Both stories are measures of the terrible job America's
press does informing people on politically-sensitive matters and of the
irrationality so commonly observed in American society. Americans behave
this way partly because they have so little understanding of the world
and live in a fantasy concerning even the realities of their own country.
American television doesn't ever show pictures of the country's dead, abused
or murdered children although there are plenty of them (anymore than it
showed the pictures of piteous Iraqi children mangled by bombs), but for
videos of the planes striking the World Trade Center, networks left the
replay switch in the "on" position for weeks. The flashing-message
signs at service-station gas pumps are not used to remind motorists of
dead kids in their neighborhood, but they sure were used to blink out idiotic
slogans like "Never Forget!" over and over after 9/11. It all
became something of a national computer game with life-like graphics, frightening
and titillating Americans, reinforcing paranoid conceptions.
-
- So far as the world is concerned, it might be fine were
Americans to remain happily cocooned in their fantasies, if only they didn't
leave their bloody set of butcher's tools in the hands of some of the world's
most ignorant and dreadful elected leaders. These armies and weapons are
never used to defend democracy or freedom or human rights (or even to stop
the several horrifying genocides that have taken place in recent decades)
- in fact, there exists no threat to America requiring such huge armies
and dreadfully destructive machines - they exist solely to bully and intimidate
and overthrow.
-
- Can you think of one example of America displaying behavior
that might be regarded as that of a human rights-respecting democracy towards
Iraq and its neighborhood? Would you include actively supporting the tyrant
Hussein for many years? Supplying him the means to wage chemical warfare
during the Iran-Iraq war? Supporting the tyrant Shah in neighboring Iran
for decades, right down to the day of his death in exile? Shooting down
an Iranian airliner full of civilians with no apologies or proper compensation?
Kissinger's duplicitous promises to the Kurds when they proved briefly
useful? Pushing American forces into view near the holy places of Saudi
Arabia after the first Gulf War?
-
- Doing decades of Enron-style business with Saudi Arabia's
feudal ruling family? Supporting, against all reason and decency, the violent
apartheid policies of Israel? Putting a leader like Musharraf of Pakistan,
elected by coup, on the regular payroll? Invading Afghanistan and making
cozy deals with psychopathic warlords? Keeping an embargo on Iraq for a
decade in the face of overwhelming proof that it was killing hundreds of
thousands of innocents? Invading and occupying Iraq?
-
- Please, is there a even hint in any of that about democracy
and concern for human rights? No, there is only the ruthless manipulation
and menacing displays of an imperial power using its might to get what
it wants. Observed from the receiving end, in no case could you distinguish
an enlightened nation at work. At the same time, on the sending end of
things, America's cowardly politicians flatter constituents' vanity about
having done brave and heroic deeds in the cause of freedom, and, truth
be told, they get away with it, every time.
-
- I wish Americans had the least spark of imagination and
will to compare their almost delusional fears with the colossal human misery
they have inflicted on the world. I wish, too, they had the imagination
and will to understand that nothing has changed with American policies
which literally assembled the forms and poured the concrete foundation
for 9/11. All that has changed is that America has spent immense resources
to pitch the world into more violence and lunacy.
-
- Osama bin Laden or whoever was responsible for 9/11 must
sit back on the anniversary date quietly chuckling as he reflects on his
achievement, not only because he was able to see all of this happen at
the mere cost of 19 followers, but because it is so stunningly clear that
America still doesn't get it.
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