Seth McAllister/AP photo
By Hank Beckman -
Twenty years ago this week I was having coffee in my living room and reading a grad school assignment when my best friend called and asked me if I thought it was Saddam or that asshole Bin Laden.
I had no idea what he was talking about; he just told me to turn on my television.
To say the sight of the World Trade Center Towers engulfed in flames and the repeated footage of two jet airliners crashing into what was the ultimate symbol of free enterprise and American exceptionalism was a jolt like no other news story in my life would be the understatement of this young century.
A person goes through a lot in a lifetime and some of it will shake us to our core and prompt serious reflection on the random quality of evil in the universe. But for sheer heart-pounding terror, nothing really rivals the sight of human beings voluntarily leaping to their deaths from 80 stories above the pavement to escape being burned alive.
The carnage unfolding onscreen in New York was followed almost immediately by reports of another plane slamming into the Pentagon and an airliner crashing in a remote field in Pennsylvania, brought down, we later learned, by passengers who had been alerted to the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor and resolved that they wanted no part of being meekly led to slaughter.
More stunning and shocking was the site of both the towers begin to pancake, crashing to the ground, one after the other and turning the area in Manhattan into what looked like a post-apocalyptic scene out of a particularly gruesome Hollywood movie.
The entire nation watched
people wondering around in a daze, covered by soot and debris to the point that one couldn’t tell what race they were; the only way to tell which sex some of them were was by the clothes they are wearing.
I made one of my usual stops at the downtown La Grange Starbucks where the baristas and regular customers wore shocked faces and hugged each other in the manner of people at the funerals of friends and family members.
I ate lunch down the street that day at Palmer Place and had the singular, eery experience of sitting with about 100 other people standing in rapt attention and complete silence as President Bush addressed the nation on the details of the opening shot of the first war of the new century. The only sounds were the occasional shifting of a chair or waitstaff going about their jobs.
I’d read enough to know that Islamic fundamentalism was a growing problem throughout the world; always an avid consumer of news, especially international affairs, I followed the events in that region of the world with interest. So the attack wasn’t really a complete surprise; a shock, yes, but one knew something like this was eminently possible.
For most of us, our first significant exposure to the Middle East and the problems in that region was the Iranian Hostage Crisis on 1979, when Islamic fanatics overthrew the Shah of Iran and took 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, humiliating Jimmy Carter and effectively ending his chances for reelection.
The years following the Iranian Revolution produced a number of provocations against the West in general and the United States in particular.
Hostages, many of them American, were taken throughout the 1980s; terrorist acts occurred with depressing regularity in Europe and the surrounding areas; finally Saddam Hussein decided he needed Kuwaiti oil to replenish his coffers depleted by a decade of war.
The first Gulf War was followed by the rise of Al Qaeda and the bloodthirsty Osama Bin Laden, who openly declared war on the United States and was responsible for bombing two United States embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole.
Yet, as terrible as these incidents were, they couldn’t compare with what happened that sunny Tuesday morning in Lower Manhattan on 9-11-01.
Most of us supported the actions taken by our government that followed the attack. Only the most determined peaceniks could find fault with President Bush’s decision to invade Afghanistan and rid the country of the Taliban.
Yes, civilians and other innocents were killed in the invasion, but when your country provides safe haven for a group that declares war on the United States and follows through with a devastating attack on what is arguably the most important district in the most important city in America—the Western World, really—there will be a price to be paid in blood.
There is an awful symmetry in those people leaping to their deaths 20 years ago and Afghanis clinging to the underside of a one of our military planes trying to escape the hell he is sure will follow our departure. The locations and cultures are different, but the impulse appears the same—anything is better than the fate that awaits me.
But after two decades of investing hard-earned treasure and American lives in trying to fashion a country into a replica of Vermont, Belgium, or San Francisco, we realize what we should have known from the beginning—the region isn’t really a country at all, but a collection of warring tribes with a capital city.
And the majority of people in that region simply don’t have the will—or maybe the desire—to fight off a ragtag band of Stone Age barbarians.
What went wrong in Afghanistan and Middle East since we decided to export liberal democracy to a region that has next to no experience with it is the subject for a much longer piece than this. People will be studying and arguing about the issue for decades, and it will come to occupy a place in our national historical consciousness not unlike Vietnam, the Cold War, or the Second World War.
There is no doubt that the attempt to bring modernity to the Middle East was well-intended and undertaken by people who had the best interests of both the inhabitants of the region and American citizens; any rhetoric you’ve ever heard about it being a war to improve the bottom line of oil companies, Halliburton, or Bechtel is nonsense on stilts.
It’s also almost certain that the citizens in the various Middle Easter countries would benefit greatly from some form of legitimate democratic government, with a modern economy, an enhanced rule of law, and protections for women and minorities.
And it’s not as if bringing democratic government to countries outside of Western Civilization is impossible.
South Korea, India, and Chile are examples of populations that installed modern government with some degree of success and, by most measures, their populations are better for it.
Even as I write this, Hong Kong and Taiwan are fighting for the right to remain independent of the repressive dictatorship in China; so it can be done.
But in the final analysis, the United States alone, powerful though it is, cannot impose freedom and modernity on a region that doesn’t want it.
Some things people have to do for themselves.
