Capable of Peace
This is the 20th anniversary of the attacks of September 11th. It is the first year without American troops on Afghan soil. An entire generation has grown up with war as a constant presence in their lives. They have grown up at a time when extreme cruelty and torture are normal ways of dealing with people. They have seen a world where waterboarding, physical, and psychological punishments have been defended. They have lived with a doctrine of “preemptive war,” justifying the right of the US to attack with full force those it deems might be an enemy. They have been taught to think that only the death of US soldiers matter. Other people’s lives are counted as collateral damage, or not counted at all. Conservative estimates place the numbers of people killed in these two decades at between 897,000 to 929,000. Less than 13,000 have been Americans.
These costs of the war on terror are far more damaging to us than $8 trillion estimate of the amount of money spent to wage war and create a secure homeland since 9-11. We are only beginning to understand how the public celebration of cruelty and violence are affecting us.
We are learning that many people simply cannot live with what they have done. Four times as many soldiers have died of suicide than in combat.
We should not let this anniversary pass without asking some hard questions. At the end of the Vietnam war, the world was reverberating with progressive, revolutionary struggles. The Vietnam victory over the US was hailed as another sign that a world ruled by white, colonial empires was coming to an end. Fueled by various strains of Marxist and progressive thinking, people across the globe were celebrating ideas of liberation, freedom and self-determination. There was the promise of our capacity to find more just and peaceful ways of living together. Strong anti-war, anti-military and pro-people’s movements felt renewed strength from the US defeat.
This time, the global context of US defeat is very different. Right wing authoritarianism is on the rise. With the election of Donald Trump in the US, the Human Rights Foundation documented that more than half the world’s population lived in an authoritarian regime with 94 counters functioning in anti-democratic ways. It concluded that authoritarianism is one of the largest — if not the largest — challenges facing humanity.
Most of these authoritarian, repressive regimes have been created or supported by US government policy. The World Bank routinely supports right wing regimes. The U.N has no anti-authoritarian task force. The excesses of the Taliban and Islamic extremist groups are in large part the direct result of US efforts to create and develop these forces as a way to oppose Russian influence in the area in the 1980’s and 90’s. Yes, these are the chickens come home to roost.
As progressives hailed the victory of the Vietnamese, the right wing set about a deliberate effort to overcome the “Vietnam Syndrome,” the reluctance to commit large numbers of US troops to any conflict. It perfected the use of surrogate wars, puppet governments, black ops, and technological weaponry.
Meanwhile, with the attacks of 9-11, progressive movements that had been evolving to challenge injustice, ecological collapse, and military expansion lost their bearings under a wave of nationalistic fervor. George W Bush received the highest public support of any president in US history with nearly 90% approval ratings. Voices for another way were lost in the thunder for revenge.
The failure of the US in Afghanistan is an opportunity for serious rethinking of why we were there. More importantly, it is an opportunity to face the fundamental question of why we were attacked in the first place. This is the question we must address if we are to become a country capable of peace.