12 September--What we remember

I tried, and for the most part succeeded, in ignoring the 9/11 memorials though the TV was was super saturated with them. It was one of the handful of incidents I will always remember where I was and what I was doing as it happened. I was driving to morning classes and listening to the news on the radio. Normally it would have been music. When I got to my destination they had already put a TV outside the offices and people were crowded around it. That remained the situation for the rest of the day with people cycling in and out as they went to class or met other demands. I felt somewhat disconnected from the events and surprised by some of the reactions even months later. On woman who was finishing her program and was interviewing for jobs balked at going to work for a company whose offices were in a Chicago skyscraper. Another didn't want to go into Chicago at all she was so afraid of another attack. I didn't share that fear which seemed so pervasive and I wasn't enthusiastic about rushing into either Iraq or Afghanistan. And I became less enthusiastic as time passed and more details were revealed and much of the "evidence" supporting the wars turned out to be utterly fraudulent.

I always thought a "war on terror" was ridiculous like so many other so-called wars over my lifetime. Terror had no territory for us to conquer. Just as poverty had no territory and communism has no territory. There were people who were poor or who believed in communism or used terror to achieve their political ends but those people could be anywhere. Ideas, strategies, and conditions have no borders. We invaded Afghanistan because its Taliban government allowed Al Qaida to set up shop there but didn't do much about Pakistan even though Osama bin Laden found refuge in the western part of the country and lived there for years before U.S. forces killed him in a raid that strained relations further with an allegedly allied sovereign country.

David Kaiser's latest post makes some astute observations on the impact of the "war on terror" on our government, defense industry, and society generally. Spoiler: none of it is good.

Now that President Biden has declared the end of the "forever wars' one would think we could reorder our financial priorities and scale back on the defense spending which already exceeds, if I remember rightly, the next ten big military spenders in the world. But, as Alfred McCoy at tomdispatch notes, the administration is proposing another almost $750billion for the Defense Department. That at the time when certain legislators are balking at a "human infrastructure" bill that comes in a $3.5 trillion for years which comes out to $350 billion per year--in other words half the Pentagon spending. Our Powers That Be are far more comfortable buying bombs and sexy high tech toy (many of which don't do what was promised) than make sure we have child care, elder care, medical care, and education for our citizens.