Never Forget

Ten years ago I was getting ready for the first day of my second year in college when my mom called and told me to turn on the television - two airliners had just crashed into the World Trade Center towers. At this point it was clear that this was an intentional action, and the media had already begun to speculate who was behind the attack. Eventually we were told Osama bin Laden, a former Mujahideen member; founder of Al-Qaeda; and mastermind behind the 1998 U.S. embassy attacks in Africa, was the culprit. He initially denied involvement but both the U.S. and British government claimed to have irrefutable evidence that bin Laden was behind the September 11th attacks.

Once we were given someone to blame, we began to struggle with what these attacks meant. What could drive someone to such hate that they'd be willing to murder 3,000 innocent men, woman, and children - some of whom were fellow Muslims? We tried to understand what caused the attacks but, somewhere along the line, we forgot that events don't occur in a vacuum and atrocities of this scope don't just spontaneously occur. So, to cope, we blamed "evil". Osama bin Laden was simply evil. He and his followers hated America and everything it stands for. We forgot our long history of acting in only OUR best interests when it comes to affairs in the Middle East. We also forgot that we blindly support Israel regardless of the human rights violations it perpetrates in it's endless war with Muslim Palestine. Those people in the Middle East cheering in the streets after 3,000 lives were annihilated? Evil Muslims. They don't hate us because we support their enemies and meddle in their affairs when it suits us, they hate us because they're evil Muslims who hate freedom.

By October we had invaded Afghanistan - the seat of Al-Qaeda's operation. We had riled ourselves into a righteous fury and social discourse was rapidly devolving into a "for us or against us" mentality. President Bush declared war on terror but forgot that you can't declare wars against hyperbole. Meanwhile, the public declared war on Islam. Mosques were defaced, shot at, and fire bombed and the general consensus seemed to be that all Muslims were dangerous, freedom-hating terrorists...even if they happened to be U.S citizens. Anyone who questioned the rabid jingoism of the time was, at best, un-American and, at worst, also a secret terrorist.

In 2003, after a year and a half in Afghanistan and no bin Laden corpse to speak of, we forgot what we were trying to accomplish and decided to invade Iraq. According to the Bush administration (and ONLY the Bush administration), Saddam Hussein was secretly in league with Osama bin Laden and needed to be taken out. There was no evidence to support this assertion but Democrats and Republicans alike forgot their critical thinking skills and voted to authorize an invasion of a sovereign country that posed no direct threat to the United States. Eventually, after it became undeniably clear that Hussein and bin Laden weren't working together and never had been, the Bush administration had to alter their reason for invading Iraq. Suddenly Saddam was in possession of "weapons of mass destruction" and we had to stop him from using them. In a stunningly Orwellian maneuver, we forgot about the original reason for the invasion and even forgot about the weapons of mass destruction when none were ever found. The reason for invading Iraq was changed yet again: Now we were spreading Democracy!

As all these justifications for invasion were being chucked down the Memory Hole, the violence in Iraq was escalating. See, we forgot that Saddam Hussein, while undeniably a horrible despot, was the only force providing stability in Iraq. When we deposed his regime it allowed insurgents to surge in to the country - creating more threats for the mighty Coalition of the Willing and making it more difficult to spread American-style Democracy!© throughout the region.

Eventually Hussein was captured and ultimately put to death. And, earlier this year, the United States military located and killed Osama bin Laden. (He was hiding in a giant, conspicuous compound in Pakistan, not in Iraq or a cave in Afghanistan.) This whole debacle started 10 years ago and the fighting continues to this day even though all the people directly responsible for 9/11 are either dead or imprisoned.

Every year we, as a nation, remind ourselves to "never forget" September 11th. As if it's possible to erase the image of a plane smashing into a building at 300 mph or of people intentionally jumping to their deaths rather than being burned alive. But what we have managed to forget is the price this seemingly endless war has cost us and what it's turned us in to.

It's been eight years since we invaded Iraq, ostensibly because Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were working together. At this point, the United States military and coalition forces are directly responsible for more civilian casualties than the 19 hijackers on September 11th. As we were cheering at aircraft carriers launching cruise missiles into populated cities, we forgot what it felt like to see people cheering in the streets when we were attacked. It seems trite to invoke Nietzsche's famous and over-used quote about starring into the abyss, but it's appropriate.

Regardless of nationality, if your family is killed by an invading force because of something you or even your country had nothing to do with, what else can you call the invaders except terrorists? There is no justification for the attacks on September 11th just like there is no justification for the murder of thousands of innocent Iraqis. How dare we continue to play the victim.