What draws us to the screen to watch crying spouses and lonely children? In part, it's a sick fascination with the day. America still can't believe that something like this could have happened to us. America, the land of democracy. America, where Disney rules with its magic wand and Microsoft monopolizes so sweetly. Sept. 11 left Americans wondering if a mistake had been made: Osama must have been wrong. But we now know that he wasn't. We know that Al Qaeda, with protection from its Taliban buddies, targeted America, and that Americans aren't exactly revered in many Arab states the way Britney Spears is here.
In discussing Sept. 11 tonight with my roommate and another Amherst student, we considered how America might handle another terrorist attack (of which we were warned by the Bush administration every week during the peak of the corporate governance crisis; now we have Iraq to distract us). What have we learned over the last year? How have we really changed besides being more aware of some of the international resentment of the U.S. and being more afraid of terrorism? It's interesting that even in this environment of learning, we've spent little time examining what we might learn from Sept. 11 and much time examining what went wrong, who did it and how we can stop them. We've perpetrated plenty of prejudice against Arabs, but made slow progress in supporting organizations that spur democracy in the Middle East.
Remember Afghanistan? That country we invaded after Sept. 11? You'll probably hear the name a few times on Sept. 11. Afghanistan, as in home of Taliban/Al Qaeda. Afghanistan, as in Osama Bin Laden. Afghanistan, as in international invasion. What you will not hear a murmur about, of course, will be: Afghanistan, as in: faltering country. We liberated the people of Afghanistan from the Taliban, but we seemed to forget how hard it might be to bring different religious sects, ethnic groups and political organizations together. While we took the correct steps in forming international coalitions to defeat the Taliban, we failed to remember lessons of old.
When we supported an Arab resistance movement to the Soviets in Afghanistan we set the stage for the possibilities of organizations like Al Qaeda. What America failed to learn is that national stability in the Middle East, post-chaos or regime change, isn't just as easy as Disney and Microsoft. Alan Greenspan can't just move in and give a speech. No one in Afghanistan even cares what's in his briefcase.
Assigned reading for George W. Bush: Seven Pillars of Wisdom (later made into the tremendous movie, "Lawrence of Arabia;" important, if the book proves too difficult for Dubya). The autobiographical text of T.E. Lawrence details Lawrence's efforts to lead the Arabs to victory over the Turks in Arabia. Lawrence faces two directions of difficulty while seeking freedom for the Arabs: from his back, the British and from the front, the enemy. It's hard not to see the parallels as we push an attack against Iraq while advocating that it will provide us with a wealth of cheap oil.
You'd think after overturning a government called the Taliban ("Taliban" itself the Persianized plural of the Arabic word, Talib, meaning student) and finding great complexity in trying to rebuild, we might have thought twice before doing it again. But it took President Bush until this week to announce that he would consult Congress, seeking approval for the war, before he went ahead with an attack that would perpetuate regime change in Iraq. Ironically and sadly, this week there was another close-call assassination attempt against Hamid Karzai in Kandahar, not to mention a car bomb in Kabul that killed 20 people.
After Sept. 11 there became a certain, if dangerous, increased tension between the U.S. and Arab states in the Middle East. This was clearly exacerbated by our strong support for Israel, even as human rights violations against innocent Palestinians went unobstructed. The lesson is clear: in order to launch any international campaign against Saddam Hussein we must work closely with Arab states to establish that Saddam presents a clear and present danger. The U.S. and Britain believed the evidence was there all along-Saddam's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction combined with his cruel use of chemical weapons on his own people made him untenable as the leader of a country, let alone one with the resources and population of Iraq.
But simple lessons have come hard for this administration. Just look at the number of Bush administration corporate fraud club members-there's a waiting list to get in. The Bush administration's "we like it, so we're gonna do it" approach to the "Hack Iraq" plan seems to contradict everything we should have learned. The approach, as Massachusetts Senator John Kerry so shrewdly put it in a recent New York Times op-ed, "has made it possible for other Arab regimes to shift their focus to the implications of war for themselves rather than keep the focus where it belongs-on the danger posed by Saddam Hussein and his deadly arsenal."
Kerry, as usual, is right. We can't allow regimes that don't trust us from the start to see the battle against Saddam as our battle against their region. If possible, an invasion of Iraq has to be about a world movement to eliminate a terrible dictator, not a U.S. plan to remove an "evil" enemy. We may not have a choice; but if a choice is available, there's only one rational approach and we've moved in the opposite direction.
The most blatant lesson that Sept. 11 eventually taught us is that it's not easy to rebuild states in the Middle East, a region with unstable leaders and without strong national identities. It's important to remember that many of the borders in the Middle East are not natural borders, but borders defined by other governments in the past. Iraq is a country with many different ethnic groups, a country far more splintered than Afghanistan. We have to wonder, if we are on the brink of failing in Afghanistan, how will we possibly rebuild Iraq?
Sept. 11 is a day to remember and a day to mourn. We must remember the many people that died at the hands of terrorists. But we must also remember to think about what we can do to learn from the day-why this happened, what it precipitated and how we can approach the world with a better strategy in the future. Part of that can be achieved by legitimizing the war against Iraq before proceeding with it; part of that can be achieved by bolstering democratic efforts in other states in the Middle East. At the very least, we owe it to the victims of Sept. 11.