9/11 Twenty Years Later. What We Should Have Been Free To Do, But Weren’t.

Maryland, USA, 11 September 2021, 12:50 hrs

I’ve spent the morning watching the same channel I watched twenty years ago today. MSNBC has since dropped from my list of news sources. They don’t do headline news; it’s a political opinion network. Not altogether a bad thing as it and CNN counter Fox, OAN and Newsmax, which is necessary and in fact critical.

I heard and watched President George Bush speak in Shanksville where a brave and determined group of passengers sacrificed their lives to save others by causing their hijacked plane to crash.

He said some things I found puzzling. He clearly defined America then as very different from now. How astute an observation. But the clear and strong way he spoke made it seem to me as if no time at all has passed. A surreal moment that will become a speech for the ages. In the end, he hit a home run. It’s his finest speech ever and I see that he has changed after all. This is an honorable man.

I wished to see a better mix between the three sites of attacks and found that New York was not given its due on the TV coverage. But it wasn’t ever truly possible to cover every observance completely on live television. That’s how much happened that terrible day.

I’ve already told where I was and what I did that day. Just one insignificant person, an asshole, on one unforgettably ugly day in history. A day that changed everything.

Today what I’ve evolved into sat and watched in reverence at the heroes; in forlorn helplessness at the victims who should be here and aren’t; in profound anger at what happened between 9/11 and yesterday, when AP News reported that the Taliban had allowed Americans to go home.

I heard a lot about “Nativism” today. I’ve heard some awful things in my time, said some, too. Assholes do that. Even as an asshole, though, you’d never catch me using that word. I’m not a Native American. The usage is incorrect. I suppose it applies as an attitude, but one equally out of place. It seems to me the reference is to our cruelty to immigrants and, in the days following the attacks, hate crimes and speech against Arab-Americans and anyone not exactly white. I think it means what white supremacists do. The bastards.

***

I’m glad that we are out of Afghanistan. I’m glad more people got out after we left, if that’s true. It puts a patch on our damaged pride and facilities a way to get it heal. Now we can deal from strength and not be under pressure to do certain things hastily.

I wasn’t truly sold on us leaving at first. Once I was, my problem became how the exit was executed. It was obviously a bug out, panic derived and carried out in panic, because we were being surrounded by the Taliban. I found no honor in the process. In fact it’s going to make it into high school text books.

But I’m no longer of the mind that President Biden has made a mistake. He doesn’t work alone; he relies on intelligence agencies and military leaders. We see a case where they were wrong and he was right. They advised against leaving.

I doubt that conclusion is a consensus, but it’s the one that made the news, and if he had done it their way, then it would have been to underestimate the Taliban. He was stuck with a situation where to remain would have been disastrous.

So looking back, leaving when we did was definitely not dishonorable. It saved the lives of those who have come home.

On the twenty year anniversary of our worst day, Donald Trump made a classless speech in which he took a shot at Biden for leaving Afghanistan. He did not say he started it or that he wanted to bring Taliban members to Camp David to negotiate. Which caused outrage in case anyone forgot.

Really? On a day like today, he repeated how he had won the election and took a major shot at Biden. What a piece of human flotsam. How evil and demented is this guy?

I’m not going to be caught doing what Trump does. Realizing my own mistake, I have pulled a post that was written in an emotional moment. I claimed America was defined by dishonor. I must, in the future, withhold my words until my emotions have settled. Because I was getting likes on that post when nobody was bothering with anything else in my archives, I realized that I had said things others wanted to read. People who probably hate Joe Biden and love Donald Trump.

But my words qualified as lies. I have since been better informed and with a bit of objectivity analyzed what President Biden had to be seeing. In fact, the new Taliban government is already in place and fully engaged. That’s how close they already were, and knew it, going back at least a few months if not longer. If I’m sitting in the Oval Office this summer, I make the same decision Biden did. Anyone, especially Trump, who says they could have done better is a goddamn liar. They don’t see the situation for what it was. They think we had a fighting force over there. We did not. We couldn’t even hold the airport, for pity’s sake. They assume that the Taliban was too weak to be a threat. These people are uninformed. Blind. Arrogant. The claims of people inflexible and opinionated, who think they know better.

Taliban forces and Al-Qaeda had been steadily growing in strength. Throw ISIS and ISIL into the mix, then look back. What we did in Iraq led to this. Writing in 2008, I predicted that our presence there had caused serious enough damage that when we left, we would cause the region to be entirely destabilized, possibly annexed by Iran. What really happened is much worse. Insurgents pouring over the border was where everything we see now started. We should never have gone there. And President Bush as much as said so. He has regrets, things that haunt him. I could see it and hear it in his speech today. What I heard most of all was that we have to get over ourselves and get back to where we were after 9/11. Unified. Determined.

Trump’s minions don’t want to hear it. But I hope enough Republicans heard Bush and experienced a sobering realization. That Trump is wrong, that he is ignorant and arrogant and his four years as president has damaged this country.

The United States of America is supposed to be above a scumbag like him.

I was wrong about the timing of our exit from Afghanistan. We may not like it, but we aren’t responsible for the lives that would have been lost had we remained any longer. The Taliban so quickly put a working government in place that it should tell you everything you need to know: we had to go, and there wasn’t one minute to spare.

I’m a patriot. I love my country. But I equally love the truth. And today I’m grateful to have been able to see and correct a mistake made from emotion combined with not getting all of the facts first. Our president is honorable, a good man. He promised during his campaign to get us out of Afghanistan and he did it. And if you don’t like how it went down, try putting yourself in his place.

What might you have done?

Twenty years of troops in Afghanistan is twenty years too long. You can argue for 17 years too long and I might agree, but well into 2021, no. We should have been long gone. Now, we finally are.

That such mistakes are so easily made in our own interpretation of events is a reflection of the influence of social media users who shut out real news. I’m never using it again. But I wish others would see the danger it facilitates.

On this 20th anniversary of our darkest day, we should have been free to look back and honor the fallen. We were not.

Donald Trump opened his mouth.