The sad legacy of 9/11 is that the assholes, on each side, won.

[kpete]

Truthdig / By Chris Hedges
A Decade After 9/11: We've Become What We Loathe
The deaths and falling towers became iconographic. The ceremonies of remembrance were skillfully hijacked by the purveyors of war and hatred.

......................

We have still not woken up to whom we have become, to the fatal erosion of domestic and international law and the senseless waste of lives, resources and trillions of dollars to wage wars that ultimately we can never win. We do not see that our own faces have become as contorted as the faces of the demented hijackers who seized the three commercial jetliners a decade ago. We do not grasp that Osama bin Laden’s twisted vision of a world of indiscriminate violence and terror has triumphed. The attacks turned us into monsters, grotesque ghouls, sadists and killers who drop bombs on village children and waterboard those we kidnap, strip of their rights and hold for years without due process. We acted before we were able to think. And it is the satanic lust of violence that has us locked in its grip.

As Wordsworth wrote:

Action is transitory—a step, a blow,

The motion of a muscle—this way or that—

’Tis done; and in the after-vacancy

We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed:

Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,

And has the nature of infinity.



We could have gone another route. We could have built on the profound sympathy and empathy that swept through the world following the attacks. The revulsion over the crimes that took place 10 years ago, including in the Muslim world, where I was working in the weeks and months after 9/11, was nearly universal. The attacks, if we had turned them over to intelligence agencies and diplomats, might have opened possibilities not of war and death but ultimately reconciliation and communication, of redressing the wrongs that we commit in the Middle East and that are committed by Israel with our blessing. It was a moment we squandered. Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement. We became the radical Islamist movement’s most effective recruiting tool. We descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists too. The sad legacy of 9/11 is that the assholes, on each side, won.

the rest:
http://www.alternet.org/world/152371/a_decade_after_9_11%3A_we%27ve_become_what_we_loathe/?page=3

[slackmaster]

1. I see it as a profound strategic failure on the part of the perpetrators

They didn't get the USA out of the Middle East.

They triggered multiple wars that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Muslims.

They triggered a global wave of Islamophobia.

Heck of a job!

[Tennessee Gal]

2. "We" are not the "assholes."

The Bush/Cheney administration manipulated things just the way they wanted to in order to achieve their ultimate goals. They are the assholes.

[xiamiam]

7. and yet it continues...except now they've stolen or profiteered more money than most countries have

and the mic is bigger and badder than ever..makes us look sttoooopid

[NRaleighLiberal]

3. ...and I ask myself the "what if?". as in what if the rightful president was in place?

How would Gore have reacted? (and...sssshhhh....would it have happened in the first place?....)

We will never know if course....but I still ask myself "what if?".....

[catbyte]

5. I torture myself with that thought all the time, NRaleighLiberal

[Name removed]

Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[NRaleighLiberal]

6. My wife is good at saying there are no "shoulda's", we look ahead...but that little tidbit of

the stolen election and who was in place on that fateful day is a major "what if" that dances in my brain quite often. Even though it would have meant LIEberman as VP - but let's not go there!

:hi:

[patrice]

4. The Oppressor is within.