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Yves right here. This text by Norman Solomon on how the US ramped up its belligerence after 9/11 and by no means regarded again is unfortunately according to what I noticed in New York Metropolis proper after the 2 towers fell. I can not inform how robust war-mongering sentiments had been among the many public at massive, however they had been appalling on show from too many individuals in authority, significantly in Christian church buildings, when one in every of Christ’s main precepts was “Flip the opposite cheek.” As a substitute, in his speech on the Nationwide Cathedral, as a substitute of mourning the deaths within the 9/11 assaults and the honoring the heroic efforts of the rescuers, President Bush dedicated the US to retaliation….when he might have simply executed so beforehand if he felt the necessity to sign the intent to hit again exhausting.
Equally, I used to be very pleased with myself for not having a drink till Thursday after the Monday assaults. I took the out of character step of going to the Unitarian Universalist church across the nook to listen to the sermon. The church was packed so I needed to sit on the ground means within the entrance, which was unlucky as a result of I couldn’t escape.
I used to be shocked to listen to the pastor at some size contradict the Unitarian core worth of pacifism1 and outdo Bush in calling for a martial response.
By Norman Solomon Initially printed at TomDispatch
[Today’s piece is adapted from the introduction to Norman Solomon’s book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press, 2023).]
The day after the U.S. authorities started routinely bombing faraway locations, the lead editorial within the New York Occasions expressed some gratification. Practically 4 weeks had handed since 9/11, the newspaper famous, and America had lastly stepped up its “counterattack in opposition to terrorism” by launching airstrikes on al-Qaeda coaching camps and Taliban army targets in Afghanistan. “It was a second we’ve anticipated ever since September 11,” the editorial mentioned. “The American folks, regardless of their grief and anger, have been affected person as they waited for motion. Now that it has begun, they’ll assist no matter efforts it takes to hold out this mission correctly.”
As america continued to drop bombs in Afghanistan, Protection Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s day by day briefings catapulted him right into a stratosphere of nationwide adulation. Because the Washington Put up’s media reporter put it: “Everyone seems to be genuflecting earlier than the Pentagon powerhouse… America’s new rock star.” That winter, the host of NBC’s Meet the Press, Tim Russert, instructed Rumsfeld: “Sixty-nine years outdated and also you’re America’s stud.”
The televised briefings that introduced such adoration included claims of deep-seated decency in what was by then already often called the International Struggle on Terror. “The focusing on capabilities, and the care that goes into focusing on, to see that the exact targets are struck, and that different targets usually are not struck, is as spectacular as something anybody might see,” Rumsfeld asserted. And he added, “The weapons which can be getting used at present have a level of precision that nobody ever dreamt of.”
No matter their diploma of precision, American weapons had been, in reality, killing a number of Afghan civilians. The Venture on Protection Alternate options concluded that American air strikes had killed greater than 1,000 civilians over the last three months of 2001. By mid-spring 2002, the Guardian reported, “as many as 20,000 Afghans could have misplaced their lives as an oblique consequence of the U.S. intervention.”
Eight weeks after the intensive bombing had begun, nevertheless, Rumsfeld dismissed any considerations about casualties: “We didn’t begin this warfare. So perceive, duty for each single casualty on this warfare, whether or not they’re harmless Afghans or harmless People, rests on the ft of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.” Within the aftermath of 9/11, the method was fueling a form of perpetual emotion machine with out an off swap.
Beneath the “warfare on terror” rubric, open-ended warfare was nicely underway — “as if terror had been a state and never a way,” as Joan Didion wrote in 2003 (two months earlier than the U.S. invasion of Iraq). “We had seen, most significantly, the insistent use of September 11 to justify the reconception of America’s right position on this planet as one in every of initiating and waging nearly perpetual warfare.”
In a single sentence, Didion had captured the essence of a shortly calcified set of assumptions that few mainstream journalists had been prepared to query. These assumptions had been catnip for the lions of the military-industrial-intelligence advanced. In spite of everything, the budgets at “nationwide safety” companies (each long-standing and newly created) had begun to soar with related huge outlays going to army contractors. Worse but, there was no finish in sight as mission creep accelerated into a touch for money.
For the White Home, the Pentagon, and Congress, the warfare on terror supplied a political license to kill and displace folks on a big scale in no less than eight international locations. The ensuing carnage usually included civilians. The lifeless and maimed had no names or faces that reached those that signed the orders and appropriated the funds. And because the years glided by, the purpose gave the impression to be not successful that multicontinental warfare however persevering with to wage it, a method with no believable finish. Stopping, in reality, grew to become primarily unthinkable. No marvel People couldn’t be heard questioning aloud when the “warfare on terror” would finish. It wasn’t presupposed to.
“I Mourn the Loss of life of My Uncle…”
The primary days after 9/11 foreshadowed what was to come back. Media retailers saved amplifying rationales for an aggressive army response, whereas the traumatic occasions of September eleventh had been assumed to be simply trigger. When the voices of shock and anguish from those that had misplaced family members endorsed going to warfare, the message could possibly be transferring and motivating.
In the meantime, President George W. Bush — with solely a single congressional damaging vote — fervently drove that warfare practice, utilizing non secular symbolism to grease its wheels. On September 14th, declaring that “we come earlier than God to wish for the lacking and the lifeless, and for many who love them,” Bush delivered a speech on the Washington Nationwide Cathedral, claiming that “our duty to historical past is already clear: to reply these assaults and rid the world of evil. Struggle has been waged in opposition to us by stealth and deceit and homicide. This nation is peaceable, however fierce when stirred to anger. This battle was begun on the timing and phrases of others. It is going to finish in a means, and at an hour, of our selecting.”
President Bush cited a narrative exemplifying “our nationwide character”: “Contained in the World Commerce Heart, one man who might have saved himself stayed till the tip together with his quadriplegic pal.”
That man was Abe Zelmanowitz. Later that month, his nephew, Matthew Lasar, responded to the president’s tribute in a prophetic means:
“I mourn the dying of my uncle, and I would like his murderers dropped at justice. However I’m not making this assertion to demand bloody vengeance… Afghanistan has greater than 1,000,000 homeless refugees. A U.S. army intervention might end result within the hunger of tens of 1000’s of individuals. What I see coming are actions and insurance policies that may price many extra harmless lives, and breed extra terrorism, not much less. I don’t really feel that my uncle’s compassionate, heroic sacrifice shall be honored by what the U.S. seems poised to do.”
The president’s introduced grandiose aims had been overwhelmingly backed by the media, elected officers, and the majority of the general public. Typical was this pledge Bush made to a joint session of Congress six days after his sermon on the Nationwide Cathedral: “Our warfare on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it surely doesn’t finish there. It is not going to finish till each terrorist group of world attain has been discovered, stopped, and defeated.”
But by late September, because the Pentagon’s assault plans grew to become public information, a couple of bereaved People started talking out in opposition. Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez, whose son Greg had died within the World Commerce Heart, supplied this public enchantment:
“We learn sufficient of the information to sense that our authorities is heading within the course of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, mother and father, mates in distant lands dying, struggling, and nursing additional grievances in opposition to us. It isn’t the best way to go. It is not going to avenge our son’s dying. Not in our son’s identify. Our son died a sufferer of an inhuman ideology. Our actions mustn’t serve the identical goal.”
Judy Keane, who misplaced her husband Richard on the World Commerce Heart, equally instructed an interviewer: “Bombing Afghanistan is simply going to create extra widows, extra homeless, fatherless youngsters.”
And Iraq Got here Subsequent
Whereas indescribable ache, rage, and concern set the U.S. cauldron to boil, nationwide leaders promised that their alchemy would carry unalloyed safety through a worldwide warfare effort. It will turn into unceasing, one during which the deaths and bereavement of equally harmless folks, because of U.S. army actions, could be completely devalued.
In tandem with Washington’s high political leaders, the fourth property was integral to sustaining the grief-fueled adrenaline rush that made launching a worldwide warfare in opposition to terrorism look like the one respectable choice, with Afghanistan initially within the nation’s gunsights and information retailers crammed with requires retribution. Bush administration officers, nevertheless, didn’t encourage any focus by any means on U.S. petro-ally Saudi Arabia, the nation from which 15 of the 19 September eleventh hijackers got here. (None had been Afghans.)
By the point america started its invasion of Afghanistan, 26 days after 9/11, the assault might simply seem like a becoming response to in style demand. Hours after the Pentagon’s missiles started to blow up in that nation, a Gallup ballot discovered that “90 % of People approve of america taking such army motion, whereas simply 5 % are opposed, and one other 5 % are uncertain.”
Such lopsided approval was a testomony to how totally the messaging for a “warfare on terror” had taken maintain. It will have then been little wanting heretical to foretell that such retribution would trigger many extra harmless folks to die than within the 9/11 mass homicide. Throughout the years to come back, the foreseeable deaths of Afghan civilians could be downplayed, discounted, or just ignored as incidental “collateral injury” (a time period that Time journal outlined as “that means lifeless or wounded civilians who ought to have picked a safer neighborhood”).
What had occurred on September eleventh remained entrance and heart. What started occurring to Afghans that October seventh could be relegated to, at most, peripheral imaginative and prescient. Amid the righteous grief that had swallowed up america, few phrases would have been much less welcome or extra related than these from a poem by W.H. Auden: “These to whom evil is finished / Do evil in return.”
Even then, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was already within the Pentagon’s crosshairs. Testifying earlier than the Senate Armed Companies Committee in September 2002, Protection Secretary Rumsfeld didn’t miss a beat when Senator Mark Dayton questioned the necessity to assault Iraq, asking, “What’s compelling us to now make a precipitous determination and take precipitous actions?”
Rumsfeld replied: “What’s totally different? What’s totally different is 3,000 folks had been killed.”
In different phrases, the humanity of those that died on 9/11 would loom so massive that the destiny of Iraqis could be rendered invisible.
In actuality, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Official claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction would equally show to be fabrications, a part of a post-9/11 sample of falsehoods used to justify aggression that made those that truly lived in Iraq distinctly irrelevant. As I shuttled between San Francisco and Baghdad thrice within the 4 months that preceded the March 2003 invasion, I felt I used to be touring between two far-flung planets, one more and more abuzz with debates a couple of coming warfare and the opposite simply hoping to outlive.
When the Bush administration and the American army machine lastly launched that warfare, it will trigger the deaths of maybe 200,000 Iraqi civilians, whereas “a number of occasions as many extra have been killed as a reverberating impact” of that battle, in response to the meticulous estimates of the Prices of Struggle Venture at Brown College. In contrast to these killed on 9/11, the Iraqi lifeless had been routinely off the American media radar display, as had been the psychological traumas suffered by Iraqis and the decimation of their nation’s infrastructure. For U.S. troopers and civilians on contractor payrolls, that warfare’s dying toll would climb to 8,250, whereas again dwelling, media consideration to the ordeals of fight veterans and their households would become fleeting at finest.
Nonetheless, for the commercial a part of the military-industrial-congressional advanced, the Iraq Struggle would show all too profitable. That lengthy conflagration gave enormous boosts to earnings for Pentagon contractors whereas, propelled by the normalization of countless warfare, Protection Division budgets saved spiking upward. And Iraq’s huge oil reserves, nationalized and off-limits to Western corporations earlier than the invasion, would find yourself in mega-corporate fingers like these of Shell, BP, Chevron, and ExxonMobil. A number of years after the invasion, some distinguished People acknowledged that the warfare in Iraq was largely for oil, together with the previous head of U.S. Central Command in Iraq, Basic John Abizaid, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and then-senator and future Protection Secretary Chuck Hagel.
The By no means-Ending Struggle on Terror
The “warfare on terror” unfold to far corners of the globe. In September 2021, when President Biden instructed the U.N. Basic Meeting, “I stand right here at present, for the primary time in 20 years, with america not at warfare,” the Prices of Struggle Venture reported that U.S. “counterterrorism operations” had been nonetheless underway in 85 international locations — together with “air and drone strikes” and “on-the-ground fight,” in addition to “so-called ‘Part 127e’ packages during which U.S. particular operations forces plan and management accomplice drive missions, army workout routines in preparation for or as a part of counterterrorism missions, and operations to coach and help overseas forces.”
Lots of these expansive actions have been in Africa. As early as 2014, pathbreaking journalist Nick Turse reported for TomDispatch that the U.S. army was already averaging “way over a mission a day on the continent, conducting operations with virtually each African army drive, in virtually each African nation, whereas constructing or build up camps, compounds, and ‘contingency safety areas.’”
Since then, the U.S. authorities has expanded its often-secretive interventions on that continent. In late August 2023, Turse wrote that “no less than 15 U.S.-supported officers have been concerned in 12 coups in West Africa and the larger Sahel throughout the warfare on terror.” Regardless of claiming that it seeks to “promote regional safety, stability, and prosperity,” the U.S. Africa Command is commonly targeted on such destabilizing missions.
With far fewer troops on the bottom in fight and extra reliance on air energy, the “warfare on terror” has advanced and diversified whereas hardly ever sparking discord in American media echo chambers or on Capitol Hill. What stays is the usual Manichean autopilot of American thought, working in sync with the structural affinity for warfare that’s constructed into the military-industrial advanced.
A sample of remorse — distinct from regret — for the enterprise militarism that didn’t triumph in Afghanistan and Iraq does exist, however there’s little proof that the underlying repetition-compulsion dysfunction has been exorcised from the nation’s foreign-policy management or mass media, not to mention its political financial system. Quite the opposite, 22 years after 9/11, the forces which have dragged america into warfare in so many international locations nonetheless retain monumental sway over overseas and army affairs. The warfare state continues to rule.
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Unitarian Universalists have all the time affirmed peace as amongst our most elementary values. We have now all the time labored to create the sorts of simply communities out of which peace emerges, and we’ve lengthy supported using nonviolent strategies of battle decision. That is the legacy we share with pacifism.
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