The Tragedy of 9/11

September 11th was a tragedy. It was also an opportunity … one we missed. There was a moment or two where some serious and seriously productive international cooperation was possible. I’m not talking about military cooperation, real or faked. I’m talking about a cooperative effort to attack the structural causes of terrorism rather than using coercion and violating our own principles in order to kill a few terrorists and/or run them out of a country or two. We had an opportunity to try and broker real peace in the Middle East or help reduce the number of unemployed men in the Arab world. We had an opportunity to constructively engage bigger threats to American and world security, like Iran and North Korea. We had an opportunity to move away from a negative international image … the pushy, obnoxious, intolerant, swashbuckling America. We had an opportunity to wake up to our place in the world … a chance to learn empathy and our own limitations. We had an opportunity to foster meaningful change around the world. We passed all of it up to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq. We passed it up in order to spend money we didn’t necessarily have, to chase boogiemen that weren’t necessarily there, to pursue an ideological impossibility, and ultimately to spread fear and anger and create more enemies. The damage we have done with our ignorance and short sightedness is hard to estimate ... but is enormous and we will be suffering from it for some time to come. September 11th was, without a doubt, a tragedy. It is a tragedy that goes far beyond the horror of the lives lost on that one day.