September 29, 2002
A different perspective of the Atrocity
Like I said yesterday, I am glad I am getting the extra hits from all of you today, and I am especially glad I didn't make a phony shitstorm to do it. This post might create such an occurrence. At least, it will if you don't read the whole thing.
In the book, What's so Great About America, Dinesh D'Souza talks about how his grandfather came to hate the English, while he held no such animosity. The reason why was that while colonialism was bad for his grandfather, the aftereffects of colonialism were good for Dinesh himself. And this got me thinking about the atrocity.
September 11 will be a cause for morning here in the United States. Thousands of people died, and a hole was carved out of our largest city. However, for millions of people, that is not the case. For them, it might even be a cause for celebration.
Now, I can already tell that the blood pressure for a lot of you out there is already starting to rise. You are probably thinking I have pulled a giant bait and switch, with 8 weeks of conservative opinion, a post which has drawn thousands of impressions, and now that I have your eyeballs on this page, I am revealing my true nature, and engaging in some Fisk/Pilger/Donahue style wailing about why we are hated. In which case, you would be wrong.
For millions of Afghans, Iraqis, and Iranians, September 11, 2001 marks the first day that their struggle for liberation received the first light of hope. Much as how Churchill was ecstatic about how Pearl Harbor brought the United States into WWII, those who suffered under the Taliban and their Arab colonial masters are ecstatic to have been liberated, and those who suffer under Saddam and the Ayatollahs have cause for hope that now, finally, their liberation is at hand. None of this would have been possible had not those 3000 died in lower Manhattan.
Had the atrocity never occurred, millions of Afghans would be suffering at the hands of the Taliban. Saddam would still be on his way to building a nuclear weapon, and we would have wasted years trying to build a go-slow approach to building an Iraqi resistance. The Iranians would still be suffering under the Ayatollahs, and we would be ignoring the Iranian people's urgent cries for freedom. We would have spent most of the summer and fall agonizing over Chandra Levy, some moronic farm bill or drug program, and ignoring the plight of millions forced to live in darkness.
The atrocity changed that. We are no longer worried about such petty things today. We are engaged in a struggle to change the very foundations upon which life in the Middle East is based. Already we have liberated 25 million people. By this time next year, another 25 million people will be liberated. The year after that, maybe another 70 million will breath the fresh air of freedom, and after that, who knows? That means that each of those who died on that September day will be responsible for liberating over 30,000 people. And that's not a cause for mourning, but a cause for celebration, and we should, alongside mourning for those who died, celebrate for those who are free, because the smiling faces of children in Kabul are as much a legacy of that horrible day as those anguished faces we saw through our television that horrible morning.
Posted by John Bono at September 29, 2002 09:47 AM | TrackBackSo far, I approve of much that has happened, and is happening. My hope is that we will stay for the long run [and not be overly insistent on everyone being our friend: eg Libya is acceptable in opposition as long as it does not threaten to cross borders), my fear is that isolationism and weariness [and sheer scale] will lead to premature withdrawals.
Some of the less acknowledged things resulting from our new stance are encouraging. Saudi Arabia, for example, had turned over its education system to the religious: now that we have made it clear that we believe that naked hatred is routinely taught and if not changed we will consider action, the SA government actually intervened to look at the textbooks. They professed surprise that even by their standards 5% of texts were so bad that they were immediately dropped. A small thing, and remember that their standards include outlawing non-Moslem religious books and public services - but two years ago it could not have happened at all.
Afghanistan (and perhaps later Iraq) is attempting to define itself as a nation rather than a physical area of antagonistic tribes. We are trying to let them, with our main advice being that it is OK to remain unfriendly as long as weaponry is not involved - but it is our physical prescence that has kept most of the guns in the closet while we are evaluated as peace-keepers or invaders. A temporary [I hope] need, but by temporary I mean five to ten years...
