On The 20th Anniversary of 9/11

How Did We Get Here?

I've written this before. I thought the 1990s were great. It was great in the wake of the end of the Cold War and many things seemed possible. Movies were fun, rock was resurgent, new things were going on in music, books were fun and interesting. It was like a flowering of ideas after a very long repression. I used to wonder how is this beautiful era going to end? I guess we found out with two things. The first was the election of Dubya, aka George W Bush as President. It was a cliff hanger that went to the supreme court and somehow the Republican lawyers wrested the outcome from Al Gore. It was the moment the Republicans allowed themselves to overtly break the rules and law to have their way. It would turn out to be an appetiser for the kind of shenanigans to follow. 

The second thing was 9/11. After the Twin Towers came down, all bets were off. The world changed overnight and suddenly we were 'at war' with 'terror'. A flood of rhetoric washed out from the White House that led to things like the war in Afghanistan (probably legit) and the Marin Iraq *definitely not legit) as well as a slew of anti-terror laws and overreach by surveillance. The last two decades continue to be marred by the responses to 9/11 which were more often than not over-reactions. Yes, nearly 4000 people died and a whole slew of system failures were exposed as well as giving birth to the internet conspiracy theory culture, but it has to be said the trillions spent on prosecuting the foreign wars and surveilling the domestic population is a ridiculously expensive price to pay. 

In that time America watered down its education and health to move money to its military industrial complex, and essentially created a generation of under-educated idiots susceptible to conspiracy theories on the internet. The worst aspects of that as blowback could be seen in the storming of the US Capitol earlier this year. 

Let's say that is all by-the-by. 9/11 happened because of a string of incompetent decisions as well and lack of leadership to act on reports. The FBI had reports it didn't follow up. The CIA delivered reports to the White House that the White House did not follow up. It was so slack entire areas of conspiracy theories have grown up around them but the essential truth is that the government of the day, the Bush Jr Administration, was largely asleep at the wheel. And when the dust settled, the republican administration used it as an opportunity to overreach on surveillance and expand powers. They say in politics one should never let a good crisis go to waste, but that sort of cynicism was exactly what characterised the events that followed. To protect democracy, they decided to circumvent democracy. We are still living with the consequences of those terrible decisions. 

My God What Have We Done?

There is a leader of Islamist thought Aga Khan IV who believes that 9/11 is a direct result of the world community ignoring the plight of the human tragedy of Afghanistan at the time. It is hard to argue with it if you remember what Afghanistan under the Taliban the first time around was like. It was repressive, regressive, iconoclastic, and most certainly toxic and misogynistic in a way that is off the scales for contemporary people living civilised society. 

Throughout the 1990s we sort of let all of that slide. They were very much on the nose but we had a way of pretending it was too far away to matter. I am certain that we will fall into that mindset again soon enough, but for the record most people didn't know where Kabul was on the map until the Americans finally sent troops.   

I think about that indifference a lot. In stark contrast to the globalised congeniality of the 1990s, there were plenty of people suffering under terrible regimes. We were very casual about the plight of people in the islamic world, partly because we didn't want to tell them how to run their governments. The world was celebrating and partying to the end of the Cold War. Bad Islamist governance in Kabul was like a distant problem we really didn't want to know about. 

There is a very telling episode of 'Seinfeld' from the 1990s that illustrates this point. It's the episode titled 'The Visa'.  It aired in January 1993 which feels like yesterday in some weird way; at least a lot closer to 9/11 than where we are today.  

George meets a lawyer named Cheryl (Maggie Han) who thinks he's very funny. When he tells Jerry and Elaine, they enthusiastically plan a double date, much to George's dismay, as he imagines himself being upstaged by Jerry. At the restaurant, Elaine asks Cheryl for advice on dealing with the lawsuit from Ping, the Chinese food delivery boy whom Elaine injured in "The Virgin". Cheryl reveals that she is the prosecuting attorney in the case, as Ping is her cousin. Jerry and Elaine joke about this coincidence, making Cheryl laugh hysterically. While she is away, George makes them promise not to be funny around her. Jerry overdoes it, making comments that are so morbid that Cheryl is depressed by the end of the date.

At Jerry's apartment, Kramer returns early from baseball fantasy camp, where he accidentally punched Mickey Mantle. Elaine sees Cheryl with George and thanks her for persuading Ping to drop the case. She says that she did that because they all seemed like such nice people. As Elaine is giving Jerry the mail that she has been holding for him while he was out of town, Babu Bhatt, the Pakistani who Jerry tried to help in "The Cafe", is hauled off by the INS. Jerry had helped him get a job and the apartment down the hall. Jerry and Elaine discover Babu's Visa renewal form in Jerry's belated mail; it had been delivered to Jerry's address by mistake. They go to the jail where Babu is being held. When they tell him what happened he becomes angry. Jerry promises to straighten things out.

Jerry has lunch with Cheryl, where he continues his morose façade, so that he can ask her to solve Babu's problems with the INS. When she sees George, she confesses that she is attracted to Jerry's dark, disturbed personality. George, realizing his scheme has backfired, tells her the truth. Stunned at this revelation, she gets up and leaves.

At Jerry's apartment, Elaine sees Ping and thanks him for dropping the case. He sneers and tells her the case is back on because they all made Cheryl mad due to Jerry's deception. Babu's brother enters and says Babu has been deported, since Cheryl neglected to follow through on the favor after George's revelation. Back in Pakistan, Babu swears eternal vengeance against Jerry.

Ouch. At the time I watched this episode, I really felt for Babu. I laughed - but I knew Babu's problems were very real, as opposed to the decidedly trivial preoccupations and obsessions of all of the characters in 'Seinfeld'. The reality gap as it were, was what made it very black humour. It turned out to be very prescient. When 9/11 happened, Babu came to mind. 9/11 was Babu exacting vengeance upon us for our indifference. 

How Did We End Up There?  

We may ask ourselves how it is we were still stationing troops in Afghanistan all these years later, until last month. The protracted history of bad decisions goes a long way back, but it may point to the funding and arming of Mujihadeen resistance fighters against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. By training those people and arming them, and then beating the Soviets out of Afghanistan they decided that the West could be beaten. And in abandoning Afghanistan to its own devices in the 1990s led to a Taliban government which saw fit to harbour Osama bin Laden and other terrorists. Without going into the various theories - conspiracy and otherwise - about whether Al Qaeda was really a thing or merely a designation/conflagration by the CIA, it is true that Afghanistan as a state went rogue and allowed itself to sponsor terrorism abroad, and it was this lack of judgement that led to 9/11 and the subsequent war and occupation of Afghanistan. 

That's all on one side. The other side is the utter lack of judgement on the side of the what became known as the Coalition of the Willing. That was the countries led by the USA that was happy to march into both Afghanistan and Iraq. Australia's part in it is pretty sorry. We sent our best troops and as they stayed and stayed, they became psychopaths on safari, committing acts that can only be described as war crimes. Nobody thought we would be there for so long, but without judgment there was no way of pulling out of Afghanistan without pulling down the state of Afghanistan we set up in the wake of the Taliban. 

It took a President even worse than George W Bush to get the USA out of Afghanistan and his solution was simply to give up Afghanistan to the very same Taliban the USA ousted in 2002. The mind boggles. It's as if Donald Trump slept through 9/11 and missed it completely. Or didn't really care. Maybe he did us all a favour in ending a forever war, and we are all looking that gift horse in the mouth. Maybe Afghanistan is better off under the Taliban, as a beacon of intolerance and religious extremism and medieval legalism. After all, why should we spend money on a place that doesn't want to conform to a civilised world? Maybe we can enjoy a decade of no wars; because I feel like we should maybe party a little bit like it's 1999, once this pandemic lifts. 

There are people in Afghanistan who are angry the West left, and let them in that terrible Dark Ages limbo. Yet it is easily arguable that we shouldn't have been there at all for as long as we were. At some point we can't fight the geopolitical gravity forever. Whatever goes up to Afghanistan must come down. 

So Will It Happen Again?

With any luck, with all the civil liberties we have given up, and all the compromises to our democracy, the one thing that won't happen again is a 9/11. Is it a high price to pay? Probably in as much as it still doesn't guarantee it won't happen again - but it is highly unlikely. Bitter lessons were learnt at all levels of government everywhere. 

As of that day, governments have given licences to themselves to compromise your privacy in exchange for security, and maybe we're all safer for it, but we are definitely not better for it. And I for one believe it when military people say we will be back in Afghanistan soon enough. It's just a terrible enough situation to draw us in. With any luck it will be the Chinese who end up trying to sort out that mess instead of us. That, would be a better outcome. Let somebody else suffer Afghanistan instead. 

The American Psyche?

Revenge Tragedies

Goodness, sometimes I really detest the opinion pieces the SMH puts out there. This one here by Waleed Aly about an episode of 'Newsroom', trying to anlayse the so-called psyche of America just takes the cake.

This episode isn't really about broadcast journalism at all. It's about America's relationship with bin Laden and the September 11 attacks. It's an artefact of our age that helps us define September 11 as a social, cultural and psychological landmark.

And if Sorkin's world is as accurate on that score as I think it is, the take-home message is this: that for Americans, or at least the American mainstream reflected here, September 11 was deeply personal. These characters are scarcely interested in bin Laden's death as some kind of strategic gain. They barely discuss anything that approximates the consequences of bin Laden's killing. But they very clearly exude a spirit of revenge finally being secured.

The newsroom cheers raucously when the news editor announces the news; news anchors jostle for the right to share the triumph with the American people in a manner that seems about more than professional ego; a peripheral character whose father was killed in the Twin Towers withdraws from the celebrations feeling hollow rather than elated, but even she agrees this is a moment for festivity.

And in perhaps the episode's cheesiest moment of patriotic triumph, a producer trapped frustratingly on a United Airlines plane stalled on the tarmac while his colleagues enjoy the exhilaration of going to air, looks the captain in the eye, then fixes on his badges and stripes, and declares solemnly that "our armed forces killed Osama bin Laden for you tonight".

Hmm. the article then goes on to argue that the killing of Osama bin Laden was mere revenge, and somehow this makes the act of slaying Osama bin Laden, somehow lacking in greater legitimacy. Well, I hate to break it to Waleed Aly, but the brokerage of revenge is actually one of the most important functions of state. The reason we have states and the judiciary predates the power of kings in Germanic tribes - and many of our law codes come to us out of those kinds of laws.

It pays to understand this a little bit more. Historically speaking, the need to broker the act of revenge exists so that society does not fall into a chaotic feud. If one reads Icelandic sagas such as Njal's saga, it is pretty clear the purpose of most laws in the Icelandic 'Althing' are to do with "making settlements" and by that, we mean brokering peace deals. Revenge is not condoned because going it alone without the wider understanding by society renders the act something that sets off a cycle of violence. This is why the law brokers settlements, and by way of brokering settlements, revenge is also brokered.

The more sophisticated our society has become through history, we have constructed elaborate narratives for what crime and punishment are, and what the point of the penal system might be; but at the heart of the function of the law in the state apparatus is to administer justice, and justice is in most part brokering settlements for grievances and revenge. This is why capital punishment still exists in parts of the world we consider otherwise civilised - like, say, America.

That the point of going after Osama bin Laden and killing him is revenge is not particularly insightful, given that we know how many perished in the 9/11 attacks (and I say this putting aside all the conspiracy theories for a moment). If the United States Government did not exact vengeance on the man who claimed responsibility for the attacks, it would be amiss in its duty of brokering the revenge. After all, it would be illegal for the aggrieved kinsmen to go after bin Laden on their own, seeking to kill him. That's called a lynch mob.

So it goes without saying that Waleed Aly is willfully misrepresenting what state-sponsored revenge actually is, in order to come at his pithy conclusion:

...Sorkin doesn't employ the explicit good-versus-evil terms that, say, George W. Bush did. There's no need. It's simply assumed. It's not in the content of the script because it's in the underlying grammar of American public culture. The Newsroom's treatment is an artefact because it does nothing more than faithfully reproduce the mythology of bin Laden that prevails amongst its audience.

That is to say, Sorkin treats bin Laden as an icon. Almost in the religious sense. As the show's star anchor Will McAvoy takes to the air to break the story, the production staff rise to their feet and look on in solemn reverence. Hereabouts it is clear this is not a news broadcast. It's a rite. A sacrament.
"For the first time in almost three decades the world has no reason to fear Osama bin Laden," begins McAvoy's eloquent monologue. It's powerful. It's moving. It's also wrong.

Bin Laden remains potent in death. He is more powerful as a symbol than a field commander, and as such lives longer than himself. That's the nature of icons.

Now, what is wrong with this? Waleed Aly is in effect complaining that Osama bin Laden has been made into a kind of straw man cipher for Islamists, while mounting his own straw man argument against America's satisfaction at having had Osama bin Laden killed.

The real complaint we should be leveling is that Osama bin Laden was killed and not captured alive; that his body was disposed at sea without so much as an autopsy. The physical being of Osama bin Laden was sent into the shadows of history pretty much the same way he came into our consciousness - through the murk of Afghanistan and Pakistan local politics and local history.  The real complaint that I for one have about the slaying of Osama bin Laden is how long it took, and the damage it has done in the mean time to our own cherished democracies. In fact it didn't get done during the tenure of George W Bush as POTUS, which leads us to wonder about all those conspiracy theories out there on the internet.

Be that as it may (as they say in Mafia movies), complaining that Osama bin Laden is understood to be 'not even political' but merely 'evil' is a bit rich coming from a muslim apologist (who only a couple weeks ago wanted to lend legitimacy to those rioting in Sydney's streets over some stupid Youtube video). The adage about living and dying by the sword fits Osama bin Laden perfectly - He chose to live by terror. That his death should be shrouded in the state sponsored terror of Navy SEAL Team 6 is entirely appropriate, and complaining about the meaning assigned to Osama bin Laden in the wake of the hit is a bit like complaining that the term 'monster' overstates the wrongdoings of say, Stalin or Idi Amin or Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il after they've done all their killing and repressing and torture and hell-making.

Somewhere there is a gallery of history's great assholes; and there is no doubt in most people's minds that Osama bin Laden has earned his spot in that gallery, well and proper. The only quibble about that is whether he was actually some kind of CIA Black Ops operative blowback asshole as per the conspiracy theories; or whether he was an autochthonous Islamist asshole; but an asshole of historic proportion, I have no doubt that's what he was. There really isn't much mileage in arguing that Osama wasn't an asshole but a projection of the embittered American psyche. You'd have more success splitting his beard hairs at the bottom of the sea where he sleeps with the fishes.

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.