9-11 Commemorative Blindness

Osama won--in the West. He drove the idiots in power to do just what he'd hoped: alienate Muslims world-wide with our cowboy-frat-boy military aggression--and at-home persecution.

Think about it: we spend hours on TV and radio talking about what 9-11 meant; about the pain it caused the survivors; about what we were doing on that day, or the day before or the day after. And it's true: the death of almost 3,000 at ground zero was a wrenching experience for many times that number. So, what did Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld do about it? Attacked Afghanistan, which is not where the attackers came from, nor where they trained, but only where their spiritual/financial leaders had gained sanctuary before the fact. And then they (we?) attacked Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9-11 (but has oil).

We lost 3,000 in one day, but how many did we kill in Baghdad's "shock and awe?" (Virtually all were civilians). Well over 100,000 lost their lives in Iraq over the course of that war, initiated by the American invasion, although estimates range up to a million. Further, Wikileaks has documented 24,498 fatalities in Afghanistan, including at least 4,000 civilians.

Now, think of all the Afghan and Iraqi stories of what happened to their loved ones and when, and what they were doing on that day, and the day before and the day after, and asking why me, Allah?. Now, consider that Afghanistan has a population estimated to be 29.8 million by the World Bank, while it estimated Iraq's population at 31.5 million. US population in 2000 was 281,421,906.

I won't bother to reduce the fatalities of each to a percentage of their respective populations, but obviously, our 9-11 hit was tiny compared to the devastation the US has wrought on others, ostensibly because they had something to do with 9-11. In fact, Iraq had nothing to do with it: none of the hijackers were Iraqi, none trained there. Saddam had kept al Qaeda out of Iraq, because it was a danger to his power.

All but one of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, so why didn't we attack the Saudis? Because, Saudis were Bush family friends? Because the oil was already in US hands (more or less)?

Osama won by instigating the US (and the UK) to wade into the Middle East maelstrom with guns blazing; he drove the American cowboy into aggressive-defense, which has not only nearly bankrupted us (like the USSR), but has cost us most of our liberties, as well.

If Reagan had a hand in bankrupting the USSR and driving it out of business, then Osama bin Laden could claim something similar: the American Empire is near collapse, aided by his ministrations vis a vis 9-11, other attacks sponsored by al Qaeda and his proclamations against us.

But we spend years deciding on the order of names of the fallen at ground zero!