Were we really a united country after the September 11 attacks? Briefly. Then the Bush administration stoked divisions that look all too familiar to us today. |
We have trained ourselves to think of Donald Trump as sui generis, an outlier in the history of the American political experience. And of course, in so many ghastly ways, he is. But he arose from somewhere; the instant and fervent attachment of millions of conservatives to his brand of search-and-destroy politics, his disregard for the truth, did not emerge from whole cloth in 2015. It had antecedents. Some thing or things inculcated in the conservative mind a fealty to that brand of relentless political warfare.
And so, on this twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, older people need to be reminded of—and younger readers told for perhaps the first time—how the Republican Party of that era used that tragedy to impose its worldview on a confused and malleable populace and to browbeat the political opposition (and how, tragically, said opposition largely complied in ways that resonate loudly today). Superficial reminiscences published this week will bemoan the "fact" that we were a country united then, and look how far we’ve fallen. It sounds soothing. But nothing could be further from the more forensically examined truth.
The nation was united in shock and grief, that much is true. A different presidential administration might have approached that reality with a certain humility; an acknowledgment—especially given the dubious terms under which it took power (the Supreme Court made George W. Bush president, not the voters, who preferred Al Gore)—that its job was to give oxygen to that shock and grief in a sincere and nonideological way. To guide a tremulous nation through a gut-churning moment without hitching the trauma to a preconceived political agenda.
Bush did just enough of that to appear to your average person to be sincere about it. He visited a mosque in Washington just six days after the attacks and said, "Islam is peace." That, to be sure, was laudable. Could you picture Trump doing that?
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Donald Trump repeatedly dozed off at the 9/11 memorial event at the Pentagon.
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But behind the scenes, other, darker wheels were spinning, almost from the moment of the attack. Donald Rumsfeld was Bush’s secretary of defense. The very afternoon of the attack, he told an aide, according to declassified, handwritten notes: "Best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time—not only U.B.L," referring to the man then known in intelligence circles as "Usama" bin Laden and widely and correctly assumed to have orchestrated the attacks. And: "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not." And not?
Hussein, at the time, was the leader of Iraq—and of what was without question a fascist, evil regime. American neoconservatives, a cohort that included Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Dick Cheney, and many others in the administration—had trained their bellicose eyes on Hussein since 1991, when the first President Bush repelled his invasion of Kuwait but spurned the neocons’ importunings to press on into Baghdad and depose Saddam. An organization, the Project for a New American Century, or PNAC, was conjured into existence during the Clinton presidency for the express purpose of keeping the pressure on U.S. administrations to wage war on Iraq. Cheney was a key figure in PNAC, a founding member in fact. He had been Bush Sr.’s defense secretary and had scorned his boss’s decision not to march on to Baghdad.
In other words: The great, unifying national tragedy was—within hours—converted into an excuse to wage a highly divisive and very ideological war, which was commenced in due course 18 months later. Those 18 months were defined by a campaign of lies about Saddam being six months away from being able to launch a nuclear weapon at the United States and having links to the 9/11 attackers. You see, Cheney, as Pentagon chief under Bush I, had developed with aides, including Wolfowitz, a plan—massively controversial at the time, when The New York Times revealed its existence in 1992—for U.S. global hegemony. At the heart of the plan was invading Iraq and turning it into a democracy.
So, to sum up: Cheney, Wolfowitz, et al. had wanted to invade Iraq since 1991. The 9/11 attacks gave them an excuse because they put the public in a jittery, revenge-seeking frame of mind. But public opinion was still skeptical, so from there, they started lying.
It worked, and they got their war. That it proved to be a disaster was no surprise. That’s what generally happens with wars when the people who start them think they’ll be cakewalks, over in weeks. I trust that sounds familiar.
On the domestic front, the uses to which the Bush team put 9/11 were possibly even worse. The surveillance powers of the federal government were expanded vastly and immediately. Those who raised questions about all this were attacked and maligned—not just for disagreeing with Bush, but for being enemies of America ("Why do you hate freedom?" became what we now call a meme in those pre-Twitter days).
Bush said in a speech a week or so after the attack that the terrorists came after us because they "hate our freedoms." It was irresponsible nonsense. Al Qaeda did not attack the United States because we have a Bill of Rights. It attacked the United States because of our military adventurism in the Middle East. I wish to be clear that I do not think it is remotely justified that 3,000 innocent civilians died because of that, but that was the justification, which bin Laden stated many times, not "our freedoms."
But once Bush said that—once he stripped the attacks of their specific motivation and assigned to them a fuzzier one that would hit average Americans in their emotional kishkes—he blurred the line of what did and did not constitute legitimate criticism of his government. Now it was about "freedom." And now, anyone who questioned any action of the administration could easily be branded an enemy of freedom.
And so we arrive at September 26, 2001, when presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer, responding to a late-night joke by Bill Maher, much more conventionally liberal then, said that Americans in this new era "need to watch what they say, watch what they do." This suggests an atmosphere of Gestapo-like censorship, but in fact none such was even needed. The world—the media, the late-night shows, the Democrats—largely censored itself.
Ah, the Democrats. A moment of national unity was appropriate. Except, ask yourself this: If these attacks had happened under President Gore, do you think Rush Limbaugh would have pled for national unity? Of course not. But still—a moment was appropriate. But only a moment. Once the neocons on the Bush team started exploiting 9/11 for a war that they had wanted to wage since 1991 and that most Democrats opposed, the Democrats should have become a genuine opposition. They failed to do that. They were cowed. They went along.
The hangover from that sad episode extends into our time. Can one draw a line, for example, from the 2002–03 Democrats’ capitulation on Bush’s war to the Democrats’ general confusion last year? I think one can. It’s a different party, with younger people who are less afraid, and who know that their base wants a more pugilistic stance. But some of the leaders are the same people. And even for those in the current leadership who weren’t there in 2001, they seem too often to have inherited the backpedaling caution that characterized the 9/11-era Democrats’ response to Bush’s aggressive posture.
So that’s what happened after 9/11. The Republican Party hijacked this national, indeed international, tragedy to start a war that was a practical and moral calamity (and I can’t write this without at least mentioning the sanctioning by the United States of America of torture and special prisons and CIA "black sites" and more) and to commence a crackdown at home that unleashed deeply reactionary forces. Those forces grew and metastasized as the nation elected its first Black president, and they became bolder and more public with the arrival of a demagogue who stripped the sentiment of its more polished veneer and got matters down to the rough surface.
I do think there’s a difference between George W. Bush and Donald Trump. I believe that Bush, on a personal level, is a decent man, while Trump is not. But personal decency is not what matters most in a leader. What matters in a leader is what he will and will not do in his public capacity for the sake of political advantage; what moral lines he draws. And Bush, after 9/11, drew a couple good lines, but he drew too many lines that pointed his party in the direction of Trump. On this anniversary, we should not forget this, or absolve him and the people who enabled him.
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Forget November 3. It’s January 3 when Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans might bury our democracy once and for all. Here’s how.
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Last week’s quiz: "Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go …" A Labor Day–related quiz on the history of work.
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1. What was the most common job in ancient Egypt?
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A. Brickmaker
B. Bricklayer
C. Reed cutter
D. Farmer
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2. Blacksmithing is one of the most ubiquitous jobs in history—hence the large number of people named Smith. But who were the first people to discover smelting and to learn the craft of blacksmithing?
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A. The Scythians of Asian Steppes
B. The Ishmaelites of Mesopotamia
C. The Hittites of Anatolia
D. The Han of China
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Answer: C, the Hittites. Anatolia, of course, is modern-day Turkey. They discovered how to do all this about 3,500 years ago.
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3. Guilds in Medieval Europe were kind of like labor unions, but they were really more like business or trade associations, or even cartels. What country abolished guilds in 1791?
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A. England
B. France
C. Spain
D. The Netherlands
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Answer: B, France. Stands to reason, given the revolution and all, but it’s sort of odd because the Jacobins, with the Le Chapelier law, banned all workers’ associations.
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4. What is the largest armed labor uprising in American history, and where did it take place?
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A. The Battle of Blair Mountain; Logan, West Virginia
B. The Ludlow Massacre; Ludlow, Colorado
C. The Haymarket Affair; Chicago, Illinois
D. The Homestead Strike; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
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Answer: A, Blair Mountain, 1921. Some 10,000 armed coal miners clashed with 3,000 lawmen and scabs. When I was growing up in Morgantown, in the northern part of the state, in the 1960s and ’70s, even then the idea of Logan County was kinda scary to me, and I don’t think I’ve ever been there.
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5. About how many coal miners were there in the United States in 1950, and about how many are there today?
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A. 703,000 and 137,000
B. 1,220,000 and 315,000
C. 658,000 and 95,000
D. 483,000 and 38,000
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Answer: D, 483,000 and 38,000. Here’s a graph showing the decline since the 1980s. Helps explain why they’re angry in coal country.
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6. What is generally considered to be the most popular labor song of all time?
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A. "The Preacher and the Slave"
B. "Sixteen Tons"
C. "Which Side Are You On?"
D. "Solidarity Forever"
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Answer: D, "Solidarity Forever." Kind of obvious, right? The music is from "John Brown’s Body" or, if you prefer, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"; the lyrics were penned by Ralph Chaplin in 1915.
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This week’s quiz: Which came first? A new little genre for the Fighting Words quiz: questions about which thing among the six choices below came first.
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1. Which came first in World War I: the entry of the United States into the war or the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from it?
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2. Which came first in World War II: the Nazis’ invasion of Norway or the Soviets’ invasion of Finland?
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3. Which of these still-useful 1920s inventions came first?
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A. The Q-Tip
B. Sliced bread
C. Frozen dinners
D. The Band-Aid
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4. In the summer of 1965, "Help!," "Like a Rolling Stone," and "(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction" were all released, dominating airplay that summer. Which came out first (and hit number one first)?
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5. Which of these home computers hit stores first?
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A. Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80
B. Apple II
C. Commodore PET
D. IBM PC
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6. Place these four twenty-first-century events in the order in which they happened: Taylor Swift’s first hit; Hurricane Katrina; assassination of Benazir Bhutto; the last episode of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.
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Your deep dive into the news from blue Washington and America. We’ll leave the GOP to others and focus on what the Democrats—and progressive groups in Washington and around the country—are doing to take back the country. All that, plus some humor!
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