By a bizarre coincidence the night before Sept. 11 2001, my husband and I were talking about what safe, secure lives we led compared to our parents who experienced the depression, World War II and the horror of the holocaust.
The very next day that sense of security was shattered. As we drove home soon after the attack (the College where we both taught was immediately closed), my husband said, "The worst thing about this is what our government is going to do in response." Minutes after the attack he was already focused on the erosion of civil liberties he saw coming in the aftermath.
I was focused on my fears of further attacks. It took me a while to get over that sense of foreboding that another attack was in the works.
But my husband was focused on the real problem. It turned out to be just as bad as he predicted--the war in Iraq, Guantanamo, torture etc. etc.
The tragic loss of life on 9/11 became justification for a far greater loss of life in Iraq.
With the Obama administration, we are slowly (much too slowly) beginning to undo the damage we inflicted on ourselves in response to September 11.
Karen Bojar
http://www.the-next-stage.com/
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The most important thing to remember on 9/11 is why America got attacked - something that gets lost in the endless navel gazing Americocentric discussions of September 11th that you tend to read in American media.
Al-Qaeda is a Political Islamist group from Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has been economically dominated by US imperialism in general, and ARAMCO, ExxonMobil, Chevron Texaco and Citibank in particular, since 1939, and has experienced a huge American military presence since 1991.
Many Saudi Arabians resent that.
Some resent it a whole lot - enough to kill over.
That's why al-Qaeda bombed the Khobar Towers (a housing complex for wealthy American oil company executives and senior US military personnel in Dharan, Saudi Arabia), that's why the bombed the USS Cole in Aden harbor, that's why they bombed the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania and that's why they bombed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Americans think we live in a fortress that can never be attacked from outside by the enemies of this country's rulers.
We found out the hard way on 9/11 that this is not true at all!
That's the real lesson of 9/11 - we are a part of the world, and when our rulers piss off people in other countries, they can, and will, try and attack this country - with the same indiscriminate Geneva Convention violating brutality that the American armed forces and intelligence services routinely engage in elsewhere.
As for President Obama - he's going to give the world the same thing Bush did, more foreign wars and military occupations - so please don't encourage people to have illusions in this "peace president" who unleashes marines on Afghanistan and the CIA's Predator unmanned bombers on Pakistan.
Obama may be making a mistake in Afghanistan but I believe he is moving this country in a very different direction from that of the Bush administration.
His speech to the Muslim world was a dramatic shift away from the Bush approach.
Surges speak louder than speeches.
Bush opted for a surge in Iraq.
Obama's opting for one in Afghanistan.
Both seem pretty cool with the PATRIOT Act. Obama's trying to shut Gitmo, but at this point who knows if that'll happen?
And Gregory Butler makes a great point about drone strikes. Obama's been using those things left and right.
We're going in the same direction we've always been going, we've just rotated the tires.
On the real, how much different is Obama's foreign policy?
He's still blowing up unarmed Muslim villagers with high explosives.
Yes, Obama does make pretty speeches to Muslim audiences speaking about tolerance - but high explosives speaks louder than words!