September 11, 2021
On the twentieth anniversary of the day terrorists from the al-Qaeda network used four civilian airplanes as weapons against the United States, the weather was eerily similar to the bright, clear blue sky of what has come to be known as 9/11. George W. Bush, who was president on that horrific day, spoke in Pennsylvania at a memorial for the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 who, on September 11, 2001, stormed the cockpit and brought their airplane down in a field, killing everyone on board but denying the terrorists a fourth American trophy.
Former president Bush said: “Twenty years ago, terrorists chose a random group of Americans, on a routine flight, to be collateral damage in a spectacular act of terror. The 33 passengers and 7 crew of Flight 93 could have been any group of citizens selected by fate. In a sense, they stood in for us all.” And, Bush continued, “The terrorists soon discovered that a random group of Americans is an exceptional group of people. Facing an impossible circumstance, they comforted their loved ones by phone, braced each other for action, and defeated the designs of evil.”
Recalling his experience that day, Bush talked of “the America I know.”
“On America's day of trial and grief, I saw millions of people instinctively grab for a neighbor's hand and rally to the cause of one another…. At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely, I saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith…. At a time when nativism could have stirred hatred and violence against people perceived as outsiders, I saw Americans reaffirm their welcome to immigrants and refugees…. At a time when some viewed the rising generation as individualistic and decadent, I saw young people embrace an ethic of service and rise to selfless action.”
Today’s commemorations of that tragic day almost a generation ago seemed to celebrate exactly what Bush did: the selfless heroism and care for others shown by those like Welles Crowther, the man in the red bandana, who helped others out of danger before succumbing himself; the airplane passengers who called their loved ones to say goodbye; neighbors; firefighters; law enforcement officers; the men and women who volunteered for military service after the attack.
That day, and our memories of it, show American democracy at its best: ordinary Americans putting in the work, even at its dirtiest and most dangerous, to take care of each other.
It is this America we commemorate today.
But even in 2001, that America was under siege by those who distrusted the same democracy today’s events commemorated. Those people, concentrated in the Republican Party, worried that permitting all Americans to have a say in their government would lead to “socialism”: minorities and women would demand government programs paid for with tax dollars collected from hardworking people—usually, white men. They wanted to slash taxes and government regulations, giving individuals the “freedom” to do as they wished.
In 1986, they had begun to talk about purifying the vote; when the Democrats in 1993 passed the so-called Motor Voter law permitting people to register to vote at certain government offices, they claimed that Democrats were buying votes. The next year, Republicans began to claim that Democrats won elections through fraud, and in 1998, the Florida legislature passed a voter ID law that led to a purge of as many as 100,000 voters from the system before the election of 2000, resulting in what the United States Commission on Civil Rights called “an extraordinarily high and inexcusable level of disenfranchisement,” particularly of African American voters.
It was that election that put George W. Bush in the White House, despite his losing the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore by more than a half a million votes.
Bush had run on the promise he would be “a uniter, not a divider,” but as soon as he took office, he advanced the worldview of those who distrusted democracy. He slashed government programs and in June pushed a $1.3 trillion cut through Congress. These measures increased the deficit without spurring the economy, and voters were beginning to sour on a presidency that had been precarious since its controversial beginnings.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, hours before the planes hit the Twin Towers, a New York Times editorial announced: “There is a whiff of panic in the air.”
And then the planes hit.
“In our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment,” Bush said. America had seemed to drift since the Cold War had ended twelve years before, but now the country was in a new death struggle, against an even more implacable foe. To defeat the nation’s enemies, America must defend free enterprise and Christianity at all costs.
In the wake of the attacks, Bush’s popularity soared to 90 percent. He and his advisers saw that popularity as a mandate to change America, and the world, according to their own ideology. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” he announced.
Immediately, the administration focused on strengthening business. It shored up the airline industry and, at the advice of oil industry executives, deregulated the oil industry and increased drilling. By the end of the year, Congress had appropriated more than $350 billion for the military and homeland security, but that money would not go to established state and local organizations; it would go to new federal programs run by administration loyalists. Bush’s proposed $2.13 trillion 2003 budget increased military spending by $48 billion while slashing highway funding, environmental initiatives, job training, and other domestic spending. It would throw the budget $401 billion in the red. Republicans attacked any opposition as an attack on “the homeland.”
The military response to the attacks also turned ideological quickly. As soon as he heard about the attacks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked his aides to see if there was enough evidence to “hit” Iraqi president Saddam Hussein as well as al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. In fact, Saddam had not been involved in the attack on America: the al-Qaeda terrorists of 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates.
Rumsfeld was trying to fit the events of 911 into the worldview of the so-called neocons who had come together in 1997 to complain that President Bill Clinton’s foreign policy was “incoherent” and to demand that the U.S. take international preeminence in the wake of the Cold War. They demanded significantly increased defense spending and American-backed “regime change” in countries that did not have “political and economic freedom.” They wanted to see a world order “friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.”
After 9/11, Bush launched rocket attacks on the Taliban government of Afghanistan that had provided a safe haven for al-Qaeda, successfully overthrowing it before the end of the year. But then the administration undertook to reorder the Middle East in America's image. In 2002, it announced that the U.S. would no longer simply try to contain our enemies as President Harry S. Truman had planned, or to fund their opponents as President Ronald Reagan had done, but to strike nations suspected of planning attacks on the U.S. preemptively: the so-called Bush Doctrine. In 2003, after setting up a pro-American government in Afghanistan, the administration invaded Iraq.
By 2004, the administration was so deeply entrenched in its own ideology that a senior adviser to Bush told journalist Ron Suskind that people like him—Suskind—were in “the reality-based community”: they believed people could find solutions based on their observations and careful study of discernible reality. But, the aide continued, such a worldview was obsolete. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore.… We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
The 9/11 attacks enabled Republicans to tar those who questioned the administration's economic or foreign policies as un-American: either socialists or traitors making the nation vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Surely, such people should not have a voice at the polls. Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression began to shut Democratic voices out of our government, aided by a series of Supreme Court decisions. In 2010, the court opened the floodgates of corporate money into our elections to sway voters; in 2013, it gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act; in 2021, it said that election laws that affected different groups of voters unevenly were not unconstitutional.
And now we grapple with the logical extension of that argument as a former Republican president claims he won the 2020 election because, all evidence to the contrary, Democratic votes were fraudulent.
Today, former president Bush called out the similarities between today’s domestic terrorists who attacked our Capitol to overthrow our government on January 6 and the terrorists of 9/11. “There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home, “he said. “But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.”
In doing so, we can take guidance from the passengers on Flight 93, who demonstrated as profoundly as it is possible to do what confronting such an ideology means. While we cannot know for certain what happened on that plane on that fateful day, investigators believe that before the passengers of Flight 93 stormed the cockpit, throwing themselves between the terrorists and our government, and downed the plane, they all took a vote.
---
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/11/politics/transcript-george-w-bush-speech-09-11-2021/index.html
http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=project_for_the_new_american_century
This letter is a stunning and heartbreaking account of our nation’s unraveling and it’s architects.
George Bush plays the wise elder statesmen today, but, he was complicit in using a tragedy to foist war and undemocratic policies on our nation.
Twenty years later we still “reap the whirlwind.”
Heather’s last sentence pierced my heart with the words “they took a vote.”
The very core of democracy is now in peril.
Here is my essay that was published in the Winston-Salem Journal yesterday. It’s behind a pay wall or I would just post a link.
“On September 11 of 2001, on the way to my studio workspace on the 92nd floor of Tower One of the World Trade Center, I witnessed a defining national tragedy. Since that day 20 years ago, I have thought a lot about those events, and the subsequent fallout from our national reaction.
There was a tidal wave of sadness that engulfed New York City in the days and weeks after the towers fell, as the colossal hole in the ground smoldered on the southern tip of Manhattan. Memorials sprung up in parks and along fences all across the city, with people posting or wearing pictures of their dead and missing loved ones. Every firehouse was shrouded in black, memorials to lost members posted at each door. There were so many funerals that the NYFD asked the public to attend so their widows wouldn’t be alone. The artists in our group gathered to absorb and commiserate as we were coming to understand what happened. The body of one of our colleagues, Michael Richards, had been found, identified by the wallet in his pocket. We were dumbstruck by all that might imply.
Yet in the midst of all the chaos and trauma, people came together to grieve and to help. Volunteers of all sorts assembled to assist in the herculean task of cleaning up Ground Zero.
Something I noticed then was the divergent ways people reacted to the catastrophe, mostly coalescing into two camps: those who asked “Why would anyone hate us so much that they would resort to such madness?”, and “They hate our freedom. Bomb them all back to the Stone Age.” The official responses boiled down to “let’s get to the bottom of this, find out who is behind it, and bring them to justice”, or “This was an act of war which cannot go unanswered in kind.” There was a brief window when our collective response might have been reasonably tempered, to treat the terrorist attacks as a criminal act, work with international allies, and prosecute the perpetrators accordingly, as we did when Islamic radicals carried out the first attack on the WTC in 1993. With the most obvious perpetrators on Sept. 11th committing suicide in the process, that outcome was distinctly unsatisfying. Even a limited war in Afghanistan, with clear objectives and a definitive end-date, seemed reasonable.
We were not to act with reason.
The profound grief over what was lost – all those who leapt to their deaths or died at their desks, brave civil servants who gave everything to save others, the loss of innocence that we could live in a country untouched and unchanged by terrorist violence – became a fissure cleaved into cultural discord. While patriotism proliferated, divisions grew. The Bush Administration, sensing the difficulties of winning in the “graveyard of nations”, opted to focus fighting where they thought they could win. Anti-war sentiment against entering Iraq was quickly subsumed by forces intent on capitalizing on our collective grief.
We once talked about “not letting the terrorists win”, by behaving as a free people. Our open society, the ease with which we entered buildings, boarded planes, welcomed strangers, communicated privately, was suddenly up for grabs. An administration that had won legitimacy by a single vote on the Supreme Court, was so eager to show it was in control after being caught flat-footed by the brazen attack, that it entered not one, but two wars. The costs were put on America’s credit card left unpaid, passed to our grandchildren in a woeful lack of critical infrastructure and essential services. The heartfelt patriotism that had joined us, has since hardened into a dangerous nationalism for some, leading to the Jan. 6th attack on our Capitol. We are reaping now what was sown then.
9/11 became a benchmark for what might move us to action against existential threats. America has since seen more large-scale tragedies; lives lost to gun violence now top 39,000/ year, the pandemic has cost us over 640,000 lives, not to mention the weather-related destruction due to the climate crisis. Still, little has caught our attention as 9/11 did.
If Osama Bin Laden’s goal was to divide America against itself, has his mission been accomplished? After 20 years, have the terrorists won after all?
It remains to be seen whether we have lost the lessons of this tragedy – that we’re better together than apart, that our government can work for all of us. The better angels of our natures are waiting to be tasked.