With bumbling federal response, terrorist attack achieved objectives

Despite being the biggest economic and military superpower of the world, the United States was defeated 10 years ago today by a bunch of guys with box cutters and a simple plan.

It didn’t have to be that way. As bad as the attacks 10 years ago were, the real defeat has come in the U.S. response over the years. The initial losses were devastating, but they were nothing compared to the self-inflicted wounds that came from politicians using the attacks as an excuse to take more power for themselves — and scared Americans have allowed it to happen with little complaint.

Everybody in the world is doing a retrospective on the anniversary today, so I’m going to try not to belabor the same things everybody else is already saying. But I do want to make five points.

First, the ultimate blame for the attacks 10 years ago today rests solely with the people who planned it, enabled it and carried it out. They have ultimate responsibility for having murdered thousands of innocent people that day. As we look to the historical causes and to the bumbling response of the U.S. government, it’s important to remember that those men consciously chose to do something very evil. It’s also important to remember the many thousands of people who died — people who never asked to be caught up in a political dispute that they didn’t create.

Second, the entire confrontation with the Arab world and Muslim world has its roots in U.S. government meddling around the world for most of the last century. The U.S. government treated the people and countries of the Middle East as pawns to achieve various other goals. If the United States hadn’t spent so much time setting up and supporting various dictators and trying to make decisions about land and people that wasn’t ours to make decisions about, the people there wouldn’t have learned to hate us. George W. Bush used to claim “they hate us for our freedom.” That’s a lie. The ones who hate us hate us because the U.S. government has interfered with the affairs of those countries — and the government has done it in our names.

Third, Americans are demonstrably less free today than we were 10 years ago this morning. It’s easier for our masters to wiretap us, demand private information about us without warrants and to monitor what we’re doing in our financial transactions. We have police who think it’s a crime to take photos of public buildings from public property — and police officials who think it’s a reasonable policy to violate the rights of peaceful Americans just for taking pictures. We are subjected to treatment at airports that we wouldn’t have put up with 10 years ago. Even with all of this, a determined and decently financed group could easily still pull off a credible attack that would terrify everyone.

Fourth, we continue to make enemies. Anyone who thinks that toppling governments in Iraq and Afghanistan has made us safer is delusional. We are killing innocent people in those countries. A whole new generation of potential terrorists has learned to hate Americans because of what the U.S. government has done in those countries. The wars have cost us massive amounts of money and made us no safer than before. New enemies will pop up when and where we least expect them — because we are determined to create new enemies.

Fifth, whatever moral authority the United States had 10 years ago today — as the victim of a vicious attack — has been slowly destroyed by how the U.S. government has treated many, many people who it simply didn’t know what to do with. Random people who were scooped up in Afghanistan and Pakistan by various authorities ended up at Guantanamo. Many of these were people who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the U.S. government didn’t want to admit it had made mistakes. Our government tortured innocent people. Some of those innocent people have returned to their countries — to tell their friends and families that the Americans truly are monsters. And I don’t blame them.

Most of us probably remember watching the news of the attacks 10 years ago this morning and wondering what it was going to mean for us. I remember comparing it to Pearl Harbor, thinking that it would change everything about the political and world landscape for five years or so. I never dreamed that we would still be embroiled in unwinnable conflicts 10 years later. I also never dreamed that politicians would use the attacks as such an opportunity to spend obscene amounts of money and grab even more power.

I’m not optimistic about what the future holds for U.S. relations with much of the Middle East and with many Muslim people around the world. The people who attacked this country 10 years ago today wanted to bring about a long-term war between their world and ours. Because of the bumbling, unwise and ignorant response of the U.S. government over the decade, they’re getting their wish.

In the most realistic sense, those dead terrorists have won. They’ve been able to reach out from the grave to keep achieving their goals, but only because the U.S. government has played the part they wanted it to play. It continues to make all of us vulnerable for the future.