It's been five years. At the time of day I start this, I was on the train into Manhattan, getting ready to walk from Penn Station to Sixth Avenue between 18th and 19th Streets. The weather was similar to what it is today, but it was five years ago. In a few hours, it will be exactly five years since the world changed. The weather didn't change much in the course of the day, but by the time I made my way home, I know things would be different. And I wondered how I would feel about the day 5, 10, 15, 20 years in the future; and what the world would look like.
It's been five years. Those whose lives were in danger are undoubtedly still traumatized; those whose loved ones were murdered on that day are still grieving, though they have somehow moved on; those fireman, cops, and rescue workers who went into the face of danger are still struggling. But for most of us, the immediacy of the attack itself is a bad memory, evoked by different cues.
How do I feel?
I feel angry.
Of course, I feel angry toward the terrorists, toward the regimes that cynically support them, for the people who cowardly and tacitly enable them.
But the most dominant feelings are frustration and disappointment. After 9/11, the good guys had a window of opportunity to engage the enemy and start winning a war that in truth has been fought since 1972. Someone - I can't remember who - wrote that it would (and should) take all the means at our disposal: military, diplomatic, economic, cultural, literary, to win this war.
We had, and still have, the resources to change the world for the better, and 9/11 provided a moment of clarity. A moment that was squandered, not by the brave people of New York and in the airplanes, certainly not by the valiant efforts of police, fire fighters, rescue and salvage workers; but by an incompetent American administration. We have the best and bravest military of all time on our side, and we're demoralizing them by depriving them of well-deserved victories.
We are right to fight the terrorists, and we are justified in killing them. We are also right in taking the war to them. I have no problems being a hardass, and I also think we have to be patient. I never had much faith in Bush, but I agreed with many of the things he said early on.
Yet here we are, and the world seems to have regressed more than it progressed. The Taliban still has the capacity to pick a serious fight. There is evidence that previously fragmented terrorist organizations (Hamas, Fatah, Hizballah, Al-Qaida, etc.,) are better networked than ever. We got rid of Saddam, but Iraq is now one of the most vulnerable places in the world. Iran and North Korea are defiantly building nuclear arms capabilities for purposes that are too horrible to contemplate. The US has lost much of its diplomatic standing and influence in the world. Europeans are by and large scared shitless and taking it out on their Jewish communities. Muslims feel more alienated from modernity than ever. Four of the world's largest oil-exporters: Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, are either unstable or provide an openly anti-American front.
What started out as a liberation of Iraq turned into an occupation and is now facing total disaster in the form of a bloody civil war that may even turn genocidal.
If Al Qaida's goal was to radicalize and broaden the conflict they were fighting, they have succeeded by any measure I can think of.
I certainly believe that the US military has learned how to fight urban insurgency much better, and we know way more about terrorist groups. But if FBI agents, Special Forces operatives, Delta Force soldiers, and SEAL warriors know how to hunt and kill bad guys, the political echelon is as clueless as ever. It's been five years, and I feel like we have no strategy, no doctrine, no path forward.
It's as if the Bushies arrived at one way to fight this war - the crudest way possible - and are lost when that didn't miraculously solve all the problems. For every Nasrallah, Bin Laden, al-Zahar, and Arafat, we have hundreds of smarter, more creative leaders. For every brainwashed suicide bomber, we have hundreds of brave, compassionate, independent fighters.
It's time to start winning. We owe it to ourselves and to the world.
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