9/11 Remembered

A Decade of Two Wars

The tenth anniversary of 9/11 is rapidly approaching. The media are rolling out interviews with people who worked at Ground Zero as well as digging up their archival footage. Just watching the TV promo spots for these things is bringing me down. I caught Channel Seven's effort tonight and an old hand from the FDNY was asked if the killing of Osama bin Laden brought closure. He replied caustically that he hated the word closure. He pointed out there was no filling the rupture in the lives of people, and that they cannot stop remembering. By extension the enemy cannot forget that day r the retribution upon bin Laden either, so there can never be such a thing as closure.

I'm trying to remember my 9/11 moment and it's pretty easy. I watched it on TV and couldn't sleep. I went to work that following Tuesday as Monday still played out in the USA and knew the world had changed. Amongst my friends I was most definitely the most hawkish in retaliating. This was because I had grown up in New York City and the World Trade Center towers meant a lot more to me than people around me. To the extent that it happened to a place I knew materially made my response a little more visceral. I had to explain to Australians that had it been a landmark of theirs like the Sydney Opera House, they wouldn't be so forgiving. To this day I find myself the least sympathetic to jihadists, terrorists, Islamists and other parties who actively hate on the West. I don't care about their grievances. It's not an intellectually satisfying position to take, but not all of our politics is for our intellectual satisfaction. Some times it is simply because a line is drawn in the sand - and we didn't even do the drawing of that line.

The toll of the Afghan War and the ill-advised Iraq War that followed has been well publicised. They are probably the two most covered wars in the history of mankind, thanks to modern communications. The freedoms we've lost, the intrusions we must endure, the suspicions we must sustain, the injuries and the dead we must accept; all keep mounting up on one side of the ledger. It is very hard to see the benefits of all this expenditure on the other side of the ledger. If Osama bin Laden wanted to see the collapse of the western world, the GFC of 2007-2008 certainly gave us an inkling of how that might already be happening - with or without this stupid pair of wars.

Still, I think it's important that the West have a quiet think about who exactly is the enemy. It might be surprised to find that it has more than a casual few.

David Hicks Again

For a guy who wants to live the rest of his life quietly, David Hicks seems to keep popping up. As you may know - long time readers here most certainly will - I have a reasonably fixed opinion of the man so it gets tedious to have him brought up in conversation and to hear both extremes of the discussion.

My own view to this day is that on 11th September 2001, upon witnessing the World Trade Center brought to ground by terrorist attacks, David Hicks chose to head to Afghanistan to side with the Taliban. I've said this before but I can't countenance his argument that he was somehow a wide-eyed kid who got caught up in these affairs almost by accident. The day he left for Afghanistan, he should have know that part of the risk would be capture by the US Marines.he shouldn't have been surprised to find himself in Guantanamo Bay.

Without going into the legalities of the plea-bargain or the Military Tribunal itself - long time readers know I covered that stuff in my previous blogs - it seems if there's one thing that could be said of David Hicks was that he got exactly what he asked for. And if he were as sanguine a human he claims to be about it today, then he might reflect on that fact and shut the fuck up and go away.