This week is here: it’s the week we commemorate the twenty-fifty anniversary of the jihadi attacks of September 11, 2001. That event, coming in the wake of my mother’s death the preceding December, put me in a funk for a good long while. Some of that funk was relieved when the Church of God Chaplains Commission asked me to put together this slide show (now video) of our church’s response to that disaster, which was shown at our 2002 General Assembly:
It’s a good time to stop and consider what has transpired since then and, really, what should have taken place. Most of the “should have” revolves around the central American figure in the whole business, George W. Bush, and his Grima Wormtongue, Dick Cheney.
The first thing was the way he characterised our response as a “war on terror.” One man’s legitimate military operation is another’s act of terror, something that anyone who takes an objective view of the Middle East knows. What we were fighting then and are now is a war on Islamic careerism, where getting to the top is the chief goal in life, as much as it is for any social climber in our own culture. In the Middle East we have two types of people: power holders and power challengers. The latter seek to dislodge the former by any means that their disposal. That includes both those outside of Islam and other Muslims who stand in their way. Sometimes who is in Islam and who isn’t is in dispute: I had a Salafi Indonesian tell me a few years later that the Shi’a in Iran were “outside of Islam,” something people in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, currently dodging missiles and drones from across the Gulf, are probably thinking these days.
Osama bin Laden and his companions, aware of how divided this country was (and is,) figured that taking down its “signature” edifices would prompt the power challengers to revolt and at least split the country so to make it incapable of either propagating its culture and/or supporting their unfavourite “little Satan,” Israel. They were badly wrong: the U.S. united in a way it hadn’t since Vietnam and assaulted their hiding place, Afghanistan. That country has been the graveyard of invader reputations (including the Iranians) for a long time; suffice it to say that, to achieve victory, we would have had to operate in a way that violated our established MO’s.
The early stages of that operation, however, were promising, which led “W” to follow that up by invading Iraq in 2003. There’s no doubt that Saddam Hussein was a tyrannical butcher, but that invasion was a fundamental mistake. W did it for two reasons. The first was to prove to his father that he could really avenge the invasion of Kuwait the previous decade, which his father stopped at the Iraqi border. The second was to bring “democracy to the Middle East,” which Bush felt would put an end to terror.
Both of these reasons were grievously faulty. The first is a typically preppy thing that we see in families of this kind. The Bush family had, W’s years as Governor of Texas notwithstanding, put more hope in Jeb (please clap) to hit the high mark and W’s narrow victory in 2000 didn’t inspire as much confidence as one would like. That’s not a good reason, however, to commit the country to a major war.
The second was a chimera from the start: the Middle East has been the poster child for autocracy since Biblical times, which has fuelled the aforementioned power holder/challenger dialectic. Our ministers, manfully trying to show that democracy was birthed in the pages of Scripture, have obscured this point, but Islam has reinforced the autocratic ways of the region. It takes years–centuries, really–for nations and cultures to absorb the ethic that makes democratic government work, and neither W nor the US had that kind of time.
There is also a strategic consideration: Iraq, Shi’ite nation that it is, was a historical enemy and suitable counterweight to Iran, which has caused trouble for the US since the 1979 revolution. It has also been a perpetual threat to the Gulf states. I am confident that George H.W. Bush refrained from making the run to Baghdad because the Saudis wisely saw Iraq as blocking an Iranian takeover of both sides of the Gulf. The current operation against Iran would be a lot simpler if Iraq hadn’t been handed over to “democracy” twenty years earlier.
The result was a war that soured Americans’ desire to be a great power in the same way–and in some ways more profoundly–that Vietnam did and obscured the tragedy and sacrifice of 9/11. We are and have been for a long time in an interconnected world; what we need is leadership that a) understands that other nations and people work and think in different ways than we do, and b) is prepared to apply the power of the country judiciously and sometimes in unconventional ways to achieve victory. Unfortunately we don’t produce people like that on either end of the political spectrum, haven’t in my lifetime and it’s unlikely that’s going to change anytime soon.
Once again we’re back in the Middle East. The current conflict doesn’t compare in scope or duration (yet, and I doubt it will) with W’s adventure in Iraq. October 7 and its aftermath was yet another reminder that the niceties we’ve built up about warfare are out the window in the “cradle of civilisation.” They’ve also reminded us that our industrial base, the bete-noire of our hippie dreamers, isn’t up to sustained support of our military (supporting Ukraine only added to that deficiency.) The saddest result so far is that we’ve been reminded of something we learned from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq: with the technology we have, it’s nearly impossible to revolt successfully against a modern state equipped with that technology, and the Iranian people have suffered immensely as a result of that.
As we commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11 and remember those who perished, we can only pray that those in power here will exhibit more wisdom than those who came before them in the past, lest we see a repeat–or worse.
Positive Infinity 