On September 11, 2001 I was seriously hung over when I found out what was happening. I was less than two months away from being thrown out of my own home and had just been ejected from the religious group that I had been involved with for decades. On Mondays nights I stayed up all night drinking so I wouldn't have to interact with my then-wife on Tuesdays, my day off. After hearing commotion downstairs, I stumbled into the living room where my kids were watching CNN. One of them told me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. At first I thought it was a small single-seater that lost control, but it soon became obvious that it was something worse. There's no question that 9-11 was a day filled with horror, but I hear a lot around this time of year about how Americans were united on 9-12, and how that unity has faded away. But were we united?
"We" is a tricky term. Who is included in "we"? What I remember from the days following 9-11 was that a lot of Americans were united in a ramping up of xenophobia and an irrational thirst for retribution. What I remember is that every Muslim American became a target of hatred. There was no recognition that Islam is a religion that exists on a continuum, from secularized children of immigrants, to Americanized families who have been here for generations, to those who are observant, and yes, including violent fanatics and fundamentalists too. The hatred of the "other" wasn't narrowly focused on jihadists either, nor did it home in on all Muslims. Anyone who looked vaguely "Arab" was target, or any convenient brown-skinned person, even American citizens. The Islamophobia metastasized into a broad based fear of immigrants and calls to seal our borders and cut off immigration from all but a few "safe" countries. "We" were unified in our hatred and fear...for a certain value of "we".
"We", in order better keep an eye on "them", supported the USA PATRIOT Act, which gave the FBI, the CIA and other intelligence agencies far reaching powers of surveillance and detention. Just for "them" you say? Let me introduce you to FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Originally passed in 1978 in order to legalize surveillance of foreign nationals alleged to be engaged in espionage, it was expanded, amended and reinterpreted in the wake of 9-11 and now includes the ability to wiretap US citizens in certain circumstances.
And let's not forget the fact that we overthrew two foreign governments, one, Afghanistan, because it harbored bin-Laden (we eventually found him in the territory of a supposed ally, Pakistan) and the other, Iraq, that had nothing to do with the 9-11 attacks, based on lies about the intelligence. Afghanistan is fresh in our minds, just having been retaken by the Taliban, whom we displaced 20 years ago, but Iraq is no success story. In addition to being overrun by the so-called Islamic State, it has moved into the orbit of Iran, a nation that is far from being an ally. The initial toppling of two governments was relatively easy, but we had no plan for what to do next, and ended up propping up corrupt governments and getting bogged down in civil wars that had questionable national security value to us. Not only were Americans dying for reasons that were foggy at best, but "the troops" were deified to the extent that one couldn't criticize the military, or even its mission, without being branded as unpatriotic. The military's influence has grown so big that it wasn't until a third president who campaigned on extricating us was elected that we actually got out.
Post 9-11 unity was an illusion.
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