9/11: Twelve Years Later

Dear Mr. President,

I’ve thought this week about how 9/11 altered history, what we’ve learned and how it changed us. Some things are obvious: in 12 years we’ve learned nothing and it’s changed us profoundly. Through ignorance, hubris and a blind lust for revenge, we invaded two countries without justification, wreaked violence and mayhem on their people, terrorized other countries with drones and Hellfire missiles, created new enemies, legalized torture, indefinite detention and targeted assassination, done away with habeas corpus and instituted the most pervasive surveillance state in human history. In our barbarity, we kill with impunity, ignore the rule of law and trample the Constitution. We’ve substituted force for foreign policy, traded freedom for the illusion of security, bankrupt our nation financially, spiritually and morally and become the main terrorist nation on the planet. The recent events in Syria have shown how automatic it is now to attack rather than negotiate or find a peaceful solution to problems. And we have yet to examine the causes of 9/11, to answer the rhetorical question “Why do they hate us?” that Bush posed and answered so flippantly and so incorrectly, a question that, considered seriously, might avert future 9/11s. We have spent trillions on war but barely begun to pay the price. More than 2 million Americans have cycled through war in Iraq and Afghanistan and 30% return from those wars suffering from PTSD. In the September 9 issue of the New Yorker, “The Return,” by David Finkel is an account of one of those soldiers who went to Iraq, lost his humanity, went numb to death, blind to brutality and now suffers from severe “moral injury.” The article follows him into a VA rehab unit, one of the few available to treat traumatized vets, where he and others try to grapple with their rage, their nightmares and their self-loathing. These men cannot escape the wars that politicians sent them to or what the military trained and ordered them to do. The article is a glimpse of what war really is, the violence, brutality and randomness of it, the unspeakable ugliness and barbarity of war that politicians call noble and honorable and heroic. There are half a million vets with PTSD. How do we bring them home? Or rather, how do we not send them in the first place? How do we outlaw not just chemical weapons, but all weapons? How do we outlaw war itself? If we never look at the roots of 9/11 how can we ever expect to end the cycle of violence?