Lessons of 9/11

We showed those terrorists. We didn’t stand by idly while they tried to hurt our country … we helped them out. We launched our selves into two wars, one of them completely unconnected to the terrorist attacks used to justify it. We reorganized our disaster response system, and were unprepared for Hurricane Katrina. We boldly compromised our values by using torture and weakening the protections that those accused of crimes normally have in our system. We wasted resources hand over fist in an effort to prevent the kind of attacks that had already happened. More importantly we wasted an unprecedented amount of goodwill, and fueled hatred in a new generation of terrorists. Now, on the tenth anniversary of the attacks, we are well on our way to losing any sense of perspective concerning the events. As long as we see them as attacks by religious wackos who hated our freedom, we will have gained nothing from our loss and be every bit as vulnerable to future attacks regardless of how many new fangled scanners we develop or how many extra personnel we station around potential targets. The bottom line is that we have been our own worst enemy and it is a mistake that we would be unlikely to avoid making again.