The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

The New York Times has no mention of
9/11 on page one today. The first article appears on page 27.

The Wrongologist has
9/11 on the front page. On the 12th
anniversary of 9/11 it’s time to talk about Osama bin Laden.

Bin Laden
was a bad man, but he was smart, he understood America. 

Along with
his great enemy, George W. Bush, Bin Laden was one of the first truly important
men of the 21st century. Important people in history do not need to be good
people. Hitler and Churchill and Gandhi were all very important 20th
century men; they weren’t all good men.

In Islam,
there is an idea that you should deal with your local problems first, and not
worry about the far enemy. Bin Laden believed that in his world, you could
not do that. Revolution at home was almost impossible because of the far
enemy, the United States. As long as the US was the superpower, revolutionary
success would be limited because the US could cripple your economy via
sanctions, and it had the military might to attack you with overwhelming
force. 

Bin
Laden’s argument was that the US had to be defeated. That the evils being
done by local regimes (such as Iraq’s Hussein, or Egypt’s Mubarak) could not be
ended by simply fighting the local regime, but that the far regime, the US,
must also be defeated.

Whatever
you think of bin Laden, his most powerful ethical point to those in the Middle
East was that the US was responsible both for the suffering it caused directly
through sanctions, and the suffering it caused indirectly, by keeping Middle
Eastern dictators in power.

To that, bin
Laden added a decisive idea: Attack the US.

Bin Laden
saw America as similar to the USSR post-Afghanistan, a country that, with a
push, might collapse. The USSR was worn down in Afghanistan. Its military
power was bled out in that “Grave of Empires”. And soon enough, the USSR
collapsed. Bin Laden saw it happen, and he participated as a fighter.

He believed
that the US was ripe for something similar.

Bin Laden believed
that if America could be drawn to Afghanistan, they could be defeated. The 9/11
attack was mostly about getting the US to invade Afghanistan. It
succeeded in doing just that. But when G.W. Bush used 9/11 primarily as a
pretext to invade Iraq, much of what bin Laden wanted to have happen in
Afghanistan happened there, with the added bonus that Saddam Hussein (who bin
Laden saw as an enemy) was dethroned. A win/win. 

Since the
US is still around, still powerful and hasn’t collapsed, and bin Laden is dead, one can say that bin Laden lost.

But it
isn’t over yet. The cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and 9/11 was huge,
both in financial terms (deficits) and in the changes wrought to the American
psyche and by our loss of constitutional protections. Those lost years should
have been used to transition the US economy. Instead the money that could have
done that was used to fund the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

It is 12
years since 9/11 and 5 years, 8 months since the start of the Great Recession. Yet,
we have fewer people employed than at the start of the recession. Income and
wealth inequality is worse. Political sclerosis is worse; our economic plan remains trickle down, while we frack our way to energy independence (which won’t succeed in the long run).

Since
9/11, we have doubled down on the surveillance state and we continue to erode our
constitutional freedoms. This has larger economic effects than most people realize,
and seriously weakens America’s ideological and moral position in the world.

Since
9/11, one tile of fear has fallen against the next and as the dominoes fall, our politicians jockey for position, selling us the latest, greatest fear:

We
are afraid of China. We distrust Russia. We fear the spread of the Syrian civil war. We fear that our budget deficits will spiral out of
control, bankrupting the most powerful and largest economy on the planet. We
fear for our kids’ safety if they walk to school alone. We fear the mob at the gates. We fear the immigrants already inside the gates. 

You could say
that the dead guy won, but the Wrongologist doesn’t believe that. We have all
the resources we need to remain the exceptional country we believe we are.

Except today,
we seem to lack the will to work through our fears.

We need to
re-learn how to exist in an uncomfortable and anxious state, in an ambiguous world without
shutting down or being ineffectual. Lately when things get tough, we strut, shorten our attention spans, prefer form over substance and pray to god
that it all works out…OMG; we are all George W. Bush. 

Remember
9/11. Let us never forget the heroes and the victims. But we must stop
sacrificing our freedoms or our common sense, to fear.