All of us of a certain age can remember where we were and what we were doing when the aircraft hit the buildings. I was at home getting ready for work along with my wife who was getting ready to go to her nursing school classes.
I was twenty-five years old, newly married, and far too naive about a lot of things, as one often is at that age. This was compounded by my being homeschooled and raised in an ultra-conservative religious fundamentalist bubble, although I was already starting to shift in my views, embarrassing Rush Limbaugh era notwithstanding.
So, 9/11 happened a half a lifetime ago for me. Literally half of my life has now been defined by those events and the aftermath.
It is impossible to look back now without noticing that the terrorists are winning the long game.
As I said, I was naive, and failed to understand what the terrorists understood: a majority of white Americans - especially the religious ones - would gladly commit national suicide given a provocation.
I will get into exactly how this is happening later in the post, but I want first to look at the internal dynamics that the terrorists understood, but many of us well-meaning Americans didn’t at the time.
A significant portion of white Americans were simmering in their rage, and just waiting for an excuse to act.
This rage was longstanding, and had been carefully stoked for decades by politicians like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and Pat Buchanan, to name just a few. It was further stoked by media figures like Rush Limbaugh. And, let us not forget, by religious charlatans, especially James Dobson.
Many white Americans, particularly Evangelicals, were still furious about the end of Jim Crow. They were furious about the immigration of the last 100 years because it was mostly darker-skinned people. They were furious that women had gained rights in society and in the family. They were furious that gay and transgender people had the gall to exist publicly.
Twenty-five years ago, I was a white Evangelical, and I didn’t see this truth. Some of it was that it is hard to notice the air you breathe. But also, for social respectability, the truth was hidden behind dog whistles and euphemisms.
9/11 changed a lot of that. You could see the break in a pair of country music songs - I wrote about that a few years ago.
Now, with the rise of Trump as the embodiment of this racist and misogynist fury, it has become all too clear that it was there all along.
What the terrorists understood was that America would devour itself, with white conservatives turning on their neighbors in hate and rage.
All it took was a flesh wound, and they would go ape-shit on the rest of us.
Sure, it started with hate against Muslims and Middle-easterners. But within a decade - if that - it also became rage against all immigrants with brown skin: Latinx immigrants, Haitian immigrants, Asian immigrants - anyone who wasn’t white.
I can sum it up in the moral disintegration of my own father, who went from praising immigrants and refugees as hard-working people seeking a better life, to calling for mass deportations (aka ethnic cleansing) and a complete shutdown of the refugee program.
It started as “Islam is an evil religion, and we shouldn’t let Muslims in.” Never mind that there are three million Muslims in the US, that they commit crimes at far lower rates than native-born white people, are more educated than native-born white people, and that they are an important part of our communities.
It then progressed to “The problem with our country are these refugees. We should shut that whole thing down.” Never mind that refugees are literally the least likely group to commit crimes, or that they have filled crucial jobs and brought new life to fading small towns.
And then, by 2018, “I don’t like Trump’s style, but at least he is finally doing something about the Hispanic problem.” And also complaints that there is nowhere left in America where you can get away from minorities. Yeesh.
So yes, the terrorists were playing the long game and they are winning.
Let’s look at the ways.
Our country is more divided than we have been not only in my lifetime, but in any time since the Civil War was fought over the right of white people to enslave black people.
We invaded two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, neither of which was actually responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Rather, the terrorists came from Saudi Arabia, who we depend on for enough oil to deter us from attacking them. And Bin Laden was hiding out in Pakistan, something which we apparently knew. But better to just go after unconnected countries we didn’t like, right?
A quarter century later, it is pretty obvious that we didn’t solve anything. Iraq gave rise to a new terrorist group, ISIS, as the result of the civil war we triggered. It was at least a decade and a half before Iraq returned to at least some level of stasis.
The cost in lives for that war is staggering. The US sacrificed more than 4000 of its soldiers, with many times that wounded. But that is dwarfed by the over one million Iraqi civilian deaths. Is it any wonder that we aren’t particularly beloved in the Middle East?
And then there is Afghanistan, which we spent two decades fighting, with the result that the Taliban, which is a terrible group in pretty much every way, even more entrenched.
It shouldn’t surprise us that this happened, of course. Going in and blowing up a country doesn’t endear you to its citizens.
In fact, the truth of the matter is that the United States has done more to create radical Islamic groups than anyone. From our CIA coup that ended democracy in Iran and our support of the Mujahedin in Afghanistan, to our current endless wars in the region, we have managed to legitimize religious fanatics as the best counterweight to American imperialism.
Fast forward to Trump’s illegal and profoundly stupid war against Iran. Which he is losing badly. Iran’s regime is more entrenched than before we attacked. Iran has realized that it can in fact control the Strait of Hormuz, and there is no way to put that genie back in the lamp. Our military bases in the Middle East look vulnerable, so much so that we were literally unable to re-provision an aircraft carrier.
No matter what we do from here, it is likely that Iran becomes the major power in the region, we lose access to our bases, and our influence becomes fairly irrelevant.
We have elected - TWICE! - a grossly incompetent wannabe dictator, whose only appeal is to the worst of human nature: racism, misogyny, bullying, transphobia, xenophobia. And that is why he won. (See my father above…)
Not only has this divided our country, but it has greatly reduced our world influence and power. Because we have turned on our allies, including freaking Canada, of all things, we are no longer seen as reliable.
Rather, the world knows that enough of us are profoundly stupid and filled with hate and rage, that any election can put another Trump in power, and we are back to the toddler tantrums.
China looks like the most obvious winner here in the long term.
Twenty-five years later, and there is no doubt that America no longer is the dominant superpower. And that we are crumbling, eaten from within.
Other suicidal stuff? We are defunding the infrastructure that made our country great. From science to healthcare to vaccines to public transit, we have chosen instead to devote our government to ethnic cleansing and mass wealth transfers to the billionaire-predator class.
Honestly, it is hard to think of any enemy the US has had that has been this effective in destroying us. (Although major assist to Russia and Vladimir Putin here as well.)
In my view, this happened because the terrorists understood the nature of religious extremism better than we did.
We should have listened to Salman Rushdie, who grasped this fundamental truth:
“Fundamentalism isn’t about religion. It is about power.”
All those white Evangelicals (and a disturbing percentage of white Catholics, Mormons, and Mainliners as well) may not have thought of themselves as extremists, but they had the necessary ingredients.
And that most important of that was fear, hate, and rage against outsiders. Here in the US, where white supremacy is our national sin, and has been since the beginning, the ugly root is and always has been a burning fury against black people. Like any wildfire, this rage never stops with one group, but expands until anyone different at all - including those of the other political party - are consumed in the “we will not allow people different from us to exist.”
The terrorists understood this, and knew that white religious people in the US would be all too easy to radicalize.
Because the root of religious fanaticism isn’t about religion at all. It is about hatred of “the other.”
And here we are.
Where one political party has turned full fascist.
Where there are open calls - from the White House! - to deport one-third of Americans. The non-white ones.
Where there are mainstream movements to end voting rights for women.
Ultimately, it turned out that the greatest threat to America was religious religious fanaticism.
But it wasn’t Islam. It was white “Christianity.”
And that is how the terrorists are winning the long game.
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Crucial to understanding the long history of American interference and exploitation of the Middle East:
A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin
Endless Enemies by Jonathan Kwitny
Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer
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Also beneficial is Rebecca Solnit's excellent book, A Paradise Built in Hell. She recently re-issued a revised version of the chapter on 9/11 online, which you can read here.
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