Editorial: America’s open wound

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/09/2011 (5208 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

About 4,000 Americans were killed or wounded during the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the Day of Infamy, but 10 years later it barely rated a paragraph in the American media. The country had moved on. The same was true for Canada on the 10th, 20th and even 30th anniversaries of major battles.

Today, 10 years after the terror attacks on American soil, the entire world is fixated on the meaning and legacy of the trauma. Unlike other wars where the cause was clear and clearly just, at least according to the prevailing consensus, the anniversary of 9/11 is marked by ambivalence.

It’s not that firm opinions don’t exist; in fact, almost every point of view is marked by certainty, but they are competing certainties: The enemy is evil and must be hunted down and destroyed; the world made a tragic miscalculation and overreacted to the threat; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were either unnecessary or botched, or both; the wars were just and have made the world safer. We had no choice, or, as songwriter Neil Young said in one of his antiwar songs, “You had a choice.”

Some facts, however, are clear: Osama bin Laden and his network of terrorists openly declared war on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, an act of violence that has probably changed America forever. It will not move on, as it did after the Second World War.

It cannot move on because the war against a diverse, resourceful and poorly understood enemy is not over. Even today, as Americans prepare to mourn their dead from 9/11, the country is on high alert because of reports terrorists plan to detonate a car bomb in New York City or Washington. Security has become the country’s main priority, a fact air travellers and Canadians trying to enter the United States understand too well.

The war in Afghanistan may be winding down, but even if it ends successfully, terrorist groups, spread across the world, acting alone and in groups, will continue to plan attacks against western targets. Some may be motivated by a hatred of Israel and the United States, while others are simply nihilists, bent on violence for the sake of it. Others are motivated by a warped sense of Islamic pride or duty.

The Arab Spring offers a glimmer of hope.

Radical Islamists such as Osama bin Laden did not support the secular leadership in Syria, Turkey, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt and had hoped to eventually create a theocratic empire across the region. But the rebellions have shown the people of those countries want modern, progressive government, not dictatorship or rule by fundamentalists.

If these revolutions are successful and if they spread, it would represent a repudiation, if not a strategic defeat, of anti-western zealots.

America enjoyed the world’s nearly unqualified support and empathy when it invaded Afghanistan to root out bin Laden and his al-Qaida network, but the goodwill evaporated following the Iraqi venture in 2003.

Today, the United States seems somewhat diminished in world stature. A faltering economy, political dysfunction and unsatisfactory results in two wars have weakened its influence and its resolve.

By some estimates, America has spent more than $3 trillion on the global war on terror, while more than 6,000 young Americans have been killed and thousands more injured. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Afghans and others have also perished. For some, that’s too high a price to have paid, but the correct price, if there is one, is impossible to answer.

Nearly 3,000 people, including 24 Canadians, were killed in the attacks on U.S. soil 10 years ago. Some critics claim the greatest threat to peace and security was America’s reaction, and not the incident itself. There may have been a better way to fight the war, but there should be no doubt — no ambivalence — that an aggressive response was necessary and absolutely justified.