ON THE AFTERNOON FOLLOWING the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, I wrote a poem, which I posted some years later at the daily mull.
If you want a country to refuse to give up a resident, you refuse to show them the evidence.
It was titled Letter to a Terrorist.
In that poem, I voiced my anger, distress, and outrage at the terrorists and their actions.
I argued that the terrorists were wrong in thinking that the human beings they hurt in that attack—the secretaries and custodians and firemen—were either evil or responsible for whatever harms they were lashing out against.
And I argued that even if the terrorists had been right, even if those working people who were only earning a living to support their families had been as evil as the terrorists imagined, the terrorists would only have become equally evil by unleashing such devastation.
They would have become the thing they hated.
I ended the poem by voicing my fears that our leaders might do the same—that they might also embrace the tactics of destruction in response, becoming like the terrorists.
Of course, we now know that they did.
They not only invaded Afghanistan, bringing chaos and death to countless innocents who had done nothing to deserve that at our hands, but they proceeded to invade Iraq—a country that had nothing at all to do with 9/11—and rain down death and destruction upon countless innocents there, as well.
The administration which orchestrated these atrocities had, at its core, a group of people who came into power determined to create an American empire, and who had planned to invade Iraq at the first opportunity long before 9/11.
This was no secret, they had said so publicly and in print.
It's useful to remember, on the anniversary of that date, what they did and why they did it.
It's useful to remember the devastation it created in our homeland—the squandering of a government surplus, the creation of an enormous deficit, and the destruction of a chance at true prosperity.
It's useful to remember that they have not repented of those policies, and that putting them back into power will only lead to a repeat of the disastrous approach which brought us to where we are—both in terms of military over-extension and in terms of economic crisis.
It's useful to remember that their response played directly into the hands of the terrorists, and have embroiled the United States in two wars and an economic disaster which the current administration is having to waste an enormous amount of time and energy to repair.
I remember one thing which upset me particularly in the early days after 9/11, before we had even invaded Afghanistan.
We had come to the conclusion that Osama bin Laden was to blame for the attacks, and President Bush demanded that Afghanistan turn him over.
Afghanistan's government responded with what I thought then, and still think, was a reasonable request.
They asked to see what evidence we had that bin Laden was really behind the attacks.
Had the tables been turned, had there been a devastating attack on Afghanistan, and had their government named someone living in the United States as the culprit, and demanded that we turn him over immediately, we would have done exactly the same thing.
We would never have allowed another country to order us to turn over a resident of the United States without even presenting our government with the evidence against him.
And if that country had not only refused to provide any evidence, but at the same time had threatened to attack us if we didn't bow down and comply, we would have been doubly certain to tell them to go to hell.
If you want a country to refuse to give up a resident, you refuse to show them the evidence.
If you want to make sure that they will refuse, you refuse to show them the evidence and threaten them at the same time.
That is exactly what George Bush did.
Which led me to believe then, and leads me to believe now, that he didn't want them to hand over bin Laden.
He didn't want to prosecute bin Laden, he didn't want to put an end to al Qaeda, he didn't want to make use of the enormous international sympathy the United States held at that time to make ourselves, and the world, a safer place.
He wanted an excuse to invade Afghanistan, and an excuse to invade Iraq.
He wanted war, as did Cheney and Rumsfeld—an excuse to commit U.S. troops to the Middle East, without regard to the cost in lives, in economic problems, in homeland security, or in The United State's moral stature in the world.
At least, that's what I thought then.
And that's what I still think today.
