What is Post 9-11 thinking? What preceded it? Do
inquiring minds really want to know?
Well, in case they do, we will start with pre 9-11
thinking. With pre 9-11 thinking, we treated terrorism like crime in that we
didn't react to it until it occurred. And because we didn't pre-emptively act
against terrorism, we didn't act against American citizens with today's
surveillance. Thus, pre 9-11 thinking granted American citizens a few more
rights and privacy than post 9-11 thinking did. However, pure pre 9-11
thinking really didn't exist. For example, our government had acted
pre-emptively to stop "millenium" terrorist attacks in 1999.
Regardless of how the would-be attacks were discovered, the Clinton
Administration acted pre-emptively.
Then, tragically, the 9-11 atrocities occurred and
we were asked to think in a new way, which was not really new to some in the
Bush Administration or the rest of the country. The "new" way of
thinking included more than just pre-emption, it meant that America could
assume this dominating position over the rest of the world so that no rival
would emerge. And a side benefit was that we would have more access to
important resources and our products would have more access to markets around
the world.
This new 9-11 thinking was based on then President
Bush's analysis of the attacks. He claimed we were attacked because those who
want our destruction were jealous of our freedoms thus implying that future
attacks were a fixed cost. But Chalmers Johnson and others pointed out that our
foreign policies, including our history of covert actions, gave more than
adequate motivation to many groups, let alone Al-Qaida, for attacking us. In
addition, interviews with Bin Laden pointed to policies like the Iraq
sanctions, which caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children,
along with our unbalanced support for Israel in its brutal occupation and
taking of Palestinian land as reasons for the attack.
But what stuck in the minds of the American people
was the assertion that we were attacked because of our freedoms. It remained,
despite our history, because it was based on how the American people wanted to
think of themselves. It was also how the Bush Administration wanted Americans
to think. That is because President Bush's response to the attacks included
increased government power and authority and that would be a very hard sell if
the attacks were due to the misuse of government power.
So President Bush started to implement post 9-11
thinking that amounted to an intensification of past American hegemony along
with warnings to any future would-be rivals for power and he insisted that the
U.S. would own space. This intensification showed that we were giving pre 9-11
thinking steroids. We should also point out that Bush's post 9-11 thinking drew
largely from the pre-911 thinking resources of a 1992 Paul Wolfowitz paper and
the 2000 Project For The New American Century paper called Rebuilding
America's Defenses. We could further summarize post 9-11 thinking by saying
that America's use of power would increase while America's accountability would
further decrease.
And as it so often happens with empires, the
policies practiced against people abroad eventually find their way home. The
increased surveillance and elimination of Habeas Corpus has been seen and
raised by the "liberal" Obama Administration with an increase in the
arrests of activists and his signing of the 2012 NDAA. In that document, our
government could indefinitely detain us without pressing charges and a following
trial by jury. The theme from Bush's first actions after 9-11 strike again.
That theme is less government accountability but more power. This sounds like a
lite-beer commercial for governments.
What we find today is that this post 9-11 thinking
is expanding at an alarming pace and it is bipartisan. The 2012 NDAA was not
only signed by a Democratic President, it received substantial support from
Democratic Congressmen along with their Republican counterparts. And the
question we need to ask ourselves is if this government power trip continues,
what will American life be like after the next 4 years? Does the movie Minority
Report or the books 1984 and Brave New World give hints
at our possible future?
So we come to the question posed in the title of this
post. Who will rescue us from post 9-11 thinking? Who will stop the increase in
power for and loss in accountability of our government? Historically speaking,
there are only two solutions here, invasion by another country or resistance.
My guess is that most people who favor change, favor the second option. And if
we are the ones to stop this journey down the road to a more authoritarian
society, we must readdress the reason why we were attacked on 9-11 and then
reeducate.
This is necessary because Bush's faulty analysis,
since it soothes the ears of patriotic Americans, is the foundation for our
government's continual quest for more. For if future attacks are more
contingent on jealousy than the abuse of power, then our government will feel
more entitled to infringe on our rights and privacy especially as technology
continues to increase the power of the individual. And we can add that more
Americans will feel obligated to accept this growing government
intrusiveness. But if the 9-11 attacks were because of America's abusive
use of power, then the obvious solution to reducing future attacks would be to
reduce the power our government has and demand more accountability. We might
quip that our government is currently reducing the chance of attack by reducing
our freedoms, which, in turn, reduces the jealousy that that terrorists have.
The necessary readdressing and reeducation will not
occur by books alone. Rather, it will occur by our conversations with friends
and neighbors, with letters and articles sent to the newspapers, and with
demanding that our educators and politicians acknowledge the facts. We must
make the abuse of American power and its consequences one of the top ten issues
people think and talk about. Only then will the call for power and less
accountability not only fall on deaf ears, it will be played before a hostile
audience.