9.10.2021 Karl Simanonok, Ph.D.
This is a fourteen-year update from the original article published at Huffington Post. Things have only gotten worse since then.
Osama bin Laden killed nearly 3,000 people on that awful day seventeen years ago, but damage and death was all he could accomplish. He could never destroy or even weaken the fundamental values and freedoms that make us Americans, because the liberties and freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution are forever beyond the reach of terrorists. Only we Americans through poor choices of leadership can damage and destroy American freedoms and liberties by allowing them to be eroded by things like the oxymoronic Patriot Act, internal spying, subversion, loss of our governmental balance of powers, covert agendas, and official lies. The Bush administration took us farther down that road of destroying America than bin Laden could have ever dreamed of, which is not an appropriate response to terrorism. Obama didn't improve the situation much but at least he didn't make it a whole lot worse. Trump however magnified the problem dramatically, debasing American values and institutions more than any president in history. If he had been working for Al Qaeda or Vladimir Putin, he couldn't have done more damage. Trump employed fear to promote his brand of Fascism; 'Trust me and America will be safer', Trump indicated! The real results of Trump's and the GOP's attempts to win acquiescence for their police state desires through fear mongering have done great damage to the very heart and soul of our great land, which will only grow worse if we allow them to continue as they have for very much longer. And that's probably true even if Trump and his accomplices are somehow not the Russian assets that they have amply demonstrated themselves to be.
As a nation we should be able to view terrorism in a larger perspective, but we have completely failed to see the forest for the trees. For example, we calmly accept death rates each and every year from tobacco that are more than a hundred times greater (400,000+ fatalities) than the worst Osama bin Laden did once. We tolerate with barely a whimper the callous corporate greed of tobacco companies that routinely kill far more Americans than bin Laden ever did, without the slightest suggestion that we should give up our freedoms and liberties to end tobacco deaths. This is not to precisely equate death by terrorism with death by tobacco because tobacco involves some choice. The point is our priorities are completely backward and wrong by focusing on, and fearing, a relatively tiny risk of death, while at the same time we remain almost completely complacent about causes of death that are orders of magnitude greater. Even the 600,000+ American Covid-19 deaths to date are still shrugged off as inconsequential by many Trump apologists who are all too often anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. But get them talking about Muslims and they practically crap their pants in anxiety and fear.
George Bush Junior was probably right when he once said that terrorism would never be eliminated, although he quickly flip-flopped on that accidentally truthful statement for obvious political reasons and reversed himself to say instead that America would win the war on terrorism. We haven't. Even after twenty years in Afghanistan, 2500 dead American soldiers, almost 4,000 dead American 'contractors' (i.e. mercenaries), and over 100,000 dead Afghans, the best we were able to accomplish was an ignominious Vietnam-style withdrawal as we let the Taliban reimpose their hideous theocratic regime upon the nation. And that's only half of our defeat, Iraq poses very similar problems that will also inevitably shame America when we exit that country too.
Europe has dealt rationally with terrorism for years without sacrificing their fundamental liberties and freedoms, and so could America if we chose to. But shifting our country in the direction of a police state is not a rational response. It is a fearful response that appears to have been carefully stage-managed for political purposes so that Bush Junior could invade Iraq.
It has not seemed to penetrate the American consciousness yet that the root cause of Islamic terrorism, religious fanaticism, is nearly as bad in our own country. We have so-called 'Christians' who seriously believe God is on their side and that He supports the killing of Muslims in foreign lands. Bush Junior and Trump pandered to these American religious extremists because they formed an important segment of their 'base', and the Supreme Court is now corrupted with a majority of religious zealouts. This does not leave a lot of room for optimism in the short term.
America's plague of religious extremists ignore the importance of our Constitutional separation of church and state. All too many of them with extreme motivations already hold significant positions of power and wealth, and the GOP is working hard to make rightwing religious extremism and it's associated white supremacy even more dominant. They may actually succeed in bringing their Armageddon down upon us, even if those Last Days are not likely to be what they expected.
One would think that after such a demonstration of evil on 9/11/01 in the name of religion, that Americans would properly react as our Founders intended by expunging every last vestige of extremist religious influences that have wormed their way into our own government. But that has not happened, and the War on Terrorism long ago morphed into a kind of Holy War for evangelicals. They are deadly serious in their belief that it is a war of Christianity against Islam, and many are eager to fight it. I have spoken face-to-face with some that put their motives exactly in those terms. Trump moving the American embassy to Jerusalem thrilled both Christian and Jewish religious extremists who dream of the mass murder of Muslims. The Muslim world recognized the move as an overt act of hostility against them. Such hostile acts can only have the effect of more terrorism instead of less, more military murdering of innocent children instead of less, more GIs coming home in caskets instead of less, more fear and hate at home instead of less. Trump thrived on this kind of chaos and manipulated it when he could for his own purposes.
The majority of the GOP feeds off much of the same extremist base as Trump does for votes and also benefits by increasing fear and hate. What isn't pointed out nearly often enough is that the many war profiteers who stand to benefit from more suffering and death are doing all they can to make that happen through their established practices of buying influence in Congress. Republican influence, primarily.
We ought to have learned from the events of 9/11 that our country’s founders had the correct vision for America, and we should react appropriately to terrorism by reaffirming our root values and making them even stronger instead of responding inappropriately with fear and consequently eroding American values and freedoms. Instead we as a country have sunk to the low moral level of terrorists ourselves by invading the Middle East under false pretenses and by allowing fear and religion to justify criminal actions like torture. By allowing the erosion of our fundamental American freedoms, we as a nation have corrupted ourselves and become our own worst enemy. The irony of it is that Islamic terrorism is almost a trivial threat to America in comparison to the wrong direction our country’s leaders have been taking us for far too long. We should be engaging in a national dialogue about how to make ourselves better and stronger as a country with the values and principles that are our birthright, and never allow those values and principles to be compromised through fear tactics. But it’s been twenty years now, and irrational fear still dominates our political scene. America deserves better. We are either going to change, or we will remain Americans in name only.
