Dictating Down to Americans from 9-11 to Iraq

Last summer, I took my first real vacation since the attacks on our nation in September 2001. My wife and I went to the same beach town we had just arrived in that sad day all those years ago. It dawned on me as I pulled into town that I had never really been able to collect my thoughts of how I felt that day, that week. All of it came rushing back to me, though, as I crossed the bridge over the bay, turned onto the Coastal Highway, and started the slow crawl through traffic behind an SUV with a 'Proud to be an American' sticker on the back.

"That's one angry eagle." I told my wife. And it was certainly a pissed off eagle that was perched next to those proud words.

My thoughts raced back in that instant to that brisk, sunny September morning at the beach in 2001. The day had been decidedly devoid of television, newspapers, and any of the other paraphernalia of I obsessed on every day at home. As we sauntered into the breakfast cafe, determined to unwind and without a care in the world, we noticed, without much interest, that there was a crowd around the television. "So what?" I said out loud, "Probably some sports nonsense."

We had followed the waitress, sat down, and asked what all of the fuss was about. The people were now packed about 5 or 6 deep in front of the set, and I had to know. "A plane flew into the World Trade Center." she told us.

My, oh my. A plane into the nation's tallest building. I had thought to myself, "Wild . . ." but, it wasn't earth-shattering enough to break up my blissful surrender to the trappings of vacationland. I ordered breakfast.

A group came in and sat at the table opposite ours. They were talking about the plane crash as an attack. I listened as closely as I could. They were saying something about the Mideast. I broke off from listening and offered up my own typically too loud commentary. "It's not like we haven't been asking for it!" I had said into the void between the conversations around us. "What do we expect?" I remember saying, oblivious to any political correctness, mindless of the consequences of open dissent with our nation and government.

No one challenged me, though. I wouldn't have expected any open challenge that day. I had grown up rebelling against the 'greatest generation's' jingoistic reflexes to militarism that had been rattled by the contradictions to their democracy in our government's prosecution of the futile war in Vietnam.

But, those days were long past, and it was actually a bit more commonplace to hear expressions of dissent and challenges to the government's authority by more than just hippies and rabble rousers like me. A shout out to no one in particular about our stupid meddling in the Middle East seemed positively harmless at the time. I cringe, though, when I reflect on the thoughtlessness of my outburst.

We left the cafe that day, and I swear, I was determined to just head to the beach. I spend my free time enmeshed in politics like an insane man. In 2001 I was recovering from the shock of Bush's ascendance to office. I needed to disconnect. I needed to pull myself away from the inane spectacle of our new Executive and his clown-dancing.

But, at that last moment, I decided to go back to the hotel room and turn on the television. It was there that I saw the second plane hit the second tower. I was crushed. We watched, listened, mourned, anguished. We crumbled to the floor in utter amazement and incredible grief as the towers improbably collapsed onto the rescuers, citizens, the streets below, and those inside.

We eventually pulled away from the carnage and destruction on the television, several hours later, and went to the boardwalk. To say that the crowd there was subdued would be an understatement. There was a silence among the vacationers that mirrored my own as my head buzzed with the horror and implications of the events. I could hear the snippets of conversations of shock and anxiety. I wondered about the possibility of other attacks. The Pentagon had had an explosion there that was attributed to a plane crash. I wondered, I guess unreasonably, about the possibility of an attack on the beach town. I imagined a cordon around the state. I felt under siege by a faceless enemy. I decided to look for a shirt with an American flag on it. I wanted to show my support for my country, my countryfolk.

I found two shirts with a small American flag on the front underneath of the words, Ocean City. I put one right on and felt an immediate affinity with folks who I would normally dismiss for their own nationalist displays of Americanism. I never would have considered actually wearing a flag in any prominent place before, except maybe on a rump patch in my freak years. But, I felt proud to wear mine as I continued my vacation. All of the flags in town were already sold. I was proud to have mine to connect with my fellow Americans around me.
When I returned home, I put a flag on my lamp post for everyone to feel. There weren't many houses without one. There weren't many cars without some sort of flag displayed on their window, bumper, or radio aerial.

The first thing I noticed on my return to the ocean town was that the flags had not been withdrawn. If anything, there were even more flags than there were in the town that sad week, years ago. The ocean town is a bit of a southern place, peppered with the southern conservatism that comes with most rural existence filled with farming, hunting, and Baptist religiosity. It was a sparse 15 years ago that I stopped fearing someone in that town spitting in the food I ordered and didn't have to fight to be seated in front of a restaurant away from the kitchen in the back. The discordant patterns of Americanism that were reflected there mirrored what I felt about my relationship with wider America. I was afraid of the racism that I felt lurked behind every cafe and storefront. I conjured my own demons and battled them more than any actual threat or affront.

From Vietnam to the Iraq invasion, to the latest militarism, these small towns have borne the brunt of the sacrifice in the percentage of their residents who serve in these contrived wars. There is a stoic wall of patriotic dogma that prevents outward displays of dissent against the missions of their precious hometown troops. It would seem the height of arrogance to face a member of these military families and babble on about the injustice of the effects of the force their loved ones are charged with prosecuting. It would, in fact, be a shame to expect these small towns to show anything less than pride in the actions of their kinfolk abroad.

There is a difference I noticed in that resort town from my last visit on 9-11. There has been a marked shift in the attitudes of Americans from anger and pride at the attacks to guarded fear and defensiveness. It still feels like solidarity, though, to want to share displays of our flags. There is an understanding and an acknowledgment in the continued displays, of the shared consequences of the course our nation took in the wake of that tragedy in New York. In the sentiment behind those continued displays is the belief that our nation will live up to the ideals and values expressed in those clean lines and in the sparkling stars that represent the contribution of our 50 states. In the sentiment behind those continued displays is the hope of a nation for some rationality and balance to our responses to those who would do our nation, interests, and allies harm. There is the hope that their government will decide to stop fighting and bring their precious soldiers home.

I know it's more than a little naive for me to suppose that our countryfolk could wake up and happen upon the horror of the continuing numbers of our nation's soldiers who are being killed daily in Iraq and Afghanistan, develop a nagging guilt over their own secret care, and haunt them into a lifetime of advocacy against war. It's harder still to take any solace at all in the amount of deaths that it would likely take to galvanize opposition against even the present mindless sacrifice of our soldiers by a zealous Bush as he squanders our nation's defenses waging his 'ideological struggle' against Iraqis.

As I write this, the number of American soldiers recorded killed (in combat) in Iraq, is fast approaching 3800 dead. Occasionally the figure will appear in the news crawl, or announced as a headline when it passes some numerical or historically comparative milestone. The deaths of our soldiers are hardly ever mentioned by the President, his Cabinet or his officers. Our supposedly free press is banned by the Executive branch of of our government and by the civilian branch of our military from photographing the coffins of the men and women who've sacrificed their lives for the Bush regime's manufactured warmongering.

In this escalation of force in Iraq alone, we have lost almost over 800 soldiers as they fought and died defending the recalcitrant Iraqi government; giving them "breathing room" to reconcile their political differences. Almost 800 American lives have been lost, just to give the Iraqis "room" to carry on with their politics. Yet, Bush seems content with the numbers of our soldiers who continue to be killed in defense of the unpopular Maliki regime. He announced his intent to keep our troops bogged down in Iraq "as long as he's president," and dismissed the increase in deaths as the acceptable consequence of his 'stay-the-course' strategy.

Why are our soldiers in Iraq being made to fight and die on one side of a multi-fronted civil war? Why are they being made to patrol the streets of Iraq's cities like policemen? Why are they being made to drive up and down Iraq's highways and roads in a IED roulette? Why are our soldiers being made to hunt for IEDs at all? Where are the Iraqi police and military who overwhelmingly outnumber our own forces? Why aren't our soldiers being allowed to stand down as the Iraqis stand up?

As Bush comes before the nation on this year's anniversary of the 9-11 attacks and argues for "more time" to press forward with his escalated occupation, his appearance is buttressed by the enabling release and broadcast of the video-taunts of his enabling al-Qaeda nemesis. The lame-duck militarist in the White House seems positively energized by the reemergence of the image of the specter he's set to use to spook Americans as he prepares to use the anniversary of that tragic day to argue that our national security would be at risk if he withdrew from Iraq.

It's not bin-Laden that Bush will warn against, but the wannabes resisting the U.S.-backed regime in Iraq who've adopted the moniker of the fugitives Bush has allowed to roam free. It's not the original 9-11 terrorists Bush let get away that he'll highlight as the primary threat in his address to the nation Tuesday. There'll be no acknowledgment of his failure to capture the fugitives; no re-dedication to the hunt. No acknowledgment will come from Bush about the pernicious influence on others who have been inspired to launch their own violent attacks; inspired by the freedom to attack, taunt, and threaten that the fugitive 9-11 suspects have wielded with impunity for six years from their safe haven in Afghanistan.

Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq has be the realization al-Qaeda's dream. Bush and his republican apologists can twist the facts every which way they want, but their diversion from the hunt for bin-Laden and his accomplices in Afghanistan to invade and occupy Iraq has to have been the single, most blundering appeasement of terrorist violence by our government ever; certainly the largest since Reagan and Bush were caught in Iran trading arms for hostages.

Consider the argument that Bush and his republicans are making after five years of letting bin-Laden run free; after five years of shifting justifications for diverting to Iraq, and flip-flops regarding the importance of capturing or killing the rebel leader and his band of thugs. They are now reduced to arguing that the best place to wage their 'war on terror' is in Iraq, as Bush put it, Iraq is the "center" of his terror war. Why? "Because bin-Laden says so."

Bush and his republicans have become accustomed to listening to the terrorists, and they want us to listen too. "Don't believe me," Bush told Americans as early as October 2006. "Listen to the enemy, or listen to Mr. Zawahiri, the number two of al Qaeda, both of whom made it clear that Iraq is central in their plans."

Nothing must thrill al-Qaeda more than to hear Bush read off passages of propaganda from the terrorists' own speeches and video dispatches. Did Bush and his republicans ever consider that al-Qaeda might be saying that Iraq represents something important to them to keep the bulk of our nation's defenses bogged down there while they enjoy their freedom from prosecution in Afghanistan/ Pakistan?

What makes more sense? That al-Qaeda would rather we had Iraq's 175,000+ U.S. troops deployed along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, or, would they rather have the piddly 20,000 or so troops we have there now defending the mayor of Kabul, Karsai? Would al-Qaeda rather have an over-deployed force in Iraq which is stretched thin and under siege, or, would the terrorists prefer, as Bush and his republicans would have us believe, that we leave Iraq and focus the bulk of our resources on their apprehension?

"This is about the best he can do," White House aide Frances Townsend said today of bin-Laden and his latest taped taunts. "This is a man on a run, from a cave, who's virtually impotent other than these tapes," she said. But, that's not the premise behind the Iraq invasion. It has been the specter of the 9-11 terrorists' influence which the White House has used as an excuse to deny them a tract of land in Iraq.

You can't help but imagine any number of responses which Bush could have made to the 9-11 attacks which would focus directly on catching the perpetrators; that would not have embroiled our nation in an "ideological struggle" in Iraq, passed on to "future presidents." In fact, Bush wants the next president to feel as obligated to the military presence in Iraq as he does. As related in the just-released book by author Robert Draper, Bush said that, he's "playing for October-November to get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence,” and, he said, “stay longer.” As if that should inspire anyone to adopt his fiasco.

It's been a year now since that September vacation (without another one in-between) -- six entire years since the devastating attacks on our nation -- and the killings of innocents and combatants surrounding Bush's militarism in Iraq has leaped tragically forward; mocking his escalation and appeasing the terror suspects he was supposed to have captured long ago.

My 9-11 peace flag is still the prominent one in front of my home these days, along with a small American flag. The sentiment behind my continued display of those flags is also hope for the future. Hope for our country. Hope for the rest of the world that Bush and his republicans will finally decide to stop fighting (or be forced to) and allow us to bring our precious soldiers home.

I have less hope, though, than I do resolve to continue opposing Bush and his republicans, who, themselves, have ignored and obstructed the will the overwhelming majority of Americans demonstrated in the last election as he watched his republican majority fall to Democrats pledged to end the occupation. Bush has been dictating down to Americans since he stood on the smoldering pile of rubble and humanity in New York with his bullhorn.

As I watch Bush argue to continue his occupation -- posturing with the lives of those who were killed on his watch in September 2001 -- I'll be thinking of those small towns across America who've given their sons, daughters, wives, husbands, brother, sister, friend, co-worker, neighbor to Bush's blundering war of opportunity he conjured out of that tragedy. I was with them in spirit when we began this odyssey on 9-11; and, was there when vengeance in Afghanistan turned to folly in Iraq. I'll be here with them on this 9-11 anniversary, watching as Bush dictates his decision down to them to sink our resources and humanity even further into the Iraqi sand -- farther still from committing himself to the justice for the perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks he promised the nation in 2001.




http://journals.democraticunderground.com/bigtree

...http://www.jake2008.com/2007/09/10/mourning-what-we-lost-on-and-after-september-11th-2001/">put it this way:

“As we mourn the senseless loss of so many lives to terrorism, let us also mourn the loss of so many of our basic American Rights and Freedoms over the past six years, the very Rights and Freedoms that make our nation a country worth living in and fighting for. The suspension of Habeas Corpus, the ‘Patriot’ Act, warrant-less wiretapping, warrant-less searches, watch Lists, national ID cards, national security ‘gag’ letters, and restrictions on our Right to Travel are all fruits from a Tree of Liberty poisoned by fear and exploited by cynical politicians.”

go Jake!

:thumbsup:

:kick: http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_ron_full_070910_dictating_down_to_am.htm