9/11 … so many missed opportunities
by Hugh Holub on Sep. 10, 2011, under politicsSeptember 11, 2001…one of those days like December 7, 1941that everyone alive remembers what they were doing when the news broke.
I was driving up to Tucson when I got a call from a federal friend who quickly summarized what was going on in New York. My first thought was find my daughter who was working at a Starbucks a few blocks from the World Trade Center.
A long day…watching horrific scenes on television and trying to track my daughter down. She saw the towers go down, and then headed north up the island to a friends apartment. For days afterwards smoke from the burning towers drifted across her home in Brooklyn. She will never forget the smell.
Looking back as terrible as 9/11 was, it could have been much worse. Terror attack scenarios had been around for years…I did a movie script based on a nuke attack on DC in the 1980s.
But what is so striking looking lack 10 years is how wrong we got everything and all the missed opportunities.
We started a war on “terror” and ended up blasting apart Iraq andAfghanistan, spending a trillion dollars in the process, Yet it took a small Navy Seal team to actually deal with Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of 9/11….ten years later.
George W. Bush and his cronies such as Dick Cheney really ought to be criminally prosecuted for getting us into a war in Iraq based on fabricated claims of weapons of mass destruction.
We should have declared war on the terrorists themselves…not some vague concept as “terror”.
We would have done much better to hunt terrorist down like the dogs they are instead of using terror as an excuse for nation building and dicatator removal
The war on “terror” has cost hundreds of billions, made our life annoying at best, and probably done little to make us safer.
Instead of reducing the number and capacity of terrorists…we’ve actually created more of them…especially in Iraq.
And we have let countries like Pakistan get away with creating safe harbors for terrorists.
There should be no where a terrorist group can run and hide…and to any country arguing its sovereign right to harbor terrorists…tough luck.
Obama’s high point as President was sending Seal Team 6 into Pakistan without telling our buddies in Islamabad what we were up to. You know if we had to the Pakis about the raid bin Laden would have disappeared.
Our response to “terror” failed to understand a serious nuance between radical Islamic “leaders” and the Muslin community.
We should have been much more focused on those whose interpretation of the Koran probably are not shared with most of the billion Muslims in the world. The radicals preaching jihad are Islamic heretics.
We have our own radical fundamentalist crazies in Christianity…in America in fact…so we should understand you cannot brand an entire religion or people as nuts when only a few preachers are crazy.
9/11 ….as such events like them tend to create a chance to really unify this country. After December 7th 1941 we united and kicked Germany’s and Japans asses and made the new world we all enjoy now.
After 9/11 we made it annoying to fly airplanes and pissed away billions in Iraq.
No wonder the American people are questioning our exceptionalism.
What we are really questioning is our leadership…from both the Republicans and Democrats… that used 9/11 to distract us and not actually deal with the terrorists.
We have a “war on terror” which is just a giant money machine to create the illusion of security while some bearded crazies are sitting in a cave somewhere in Pakistan trying to figure out how to hurt us again.
We need to spend more money on hunting these guys down in their caves and sending them to “paradise” and not buying more body scanners for our airports.
September 11th, 2011 on 7:42 am
The horror for me, after the horror that was 9/11, is that we got into a war we cannot ever “win”, in addition to the thousands dead and still dying as a result of that day, we can add thousands dead in endless war. The missed opportunity that stands out for me is the opportunity that existed to have put more thought into how the hell we would ever get out of fighting these wars. I don’t know, really, what exact decisions should have been made on that day, about striking back….somehow I can’t help but feel the decisions were missing a link here and there. Now, Rumsfield, Cheney, and Bush have gone on leaving us with nothing but a legacy of destruction and death passing the numbers killed on 9/11. How does that honor those who died that day?
September 11th, 2011 on 9:23 am
Sharon, what a silly thing to say. Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld left us with “nothing but a legacy of destruction and death?” Did we have any more 9/11s? Has terrorism devastated your life and ruined your world?
No, instead you have the security and safety to wax confusedly about the world we live in. You can get away with holding childish and fanciful views, because the viciousness of the real world has been kept far, far away from our shores.
We fight these wars over there, Sharon, so we don’t have to fight them here.
THAT is how we honored those who died on that horrible day. Many Americans rose up and made sure it didn’t happen again. They also made sure that many other Americans could continue to live in naive bubbles, detached in part or in full from reality.
Just to be clear—I readily admit that many mistakes were made in the responses to 9/11. Mistakes and misjudgements are made in all wars. Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld did get some things wrong. Nevertheless, I categorically reject your judgements as immature.
September 11th, 2011 on 9:13 am
“George W. Bush and his cronies such as Dick Cheney really ought to be criminally prosecuted for getting us into a war in Iraq based on fabricated claims of weapons of mass destruction.”
Not to mention what they and their successors have done to our civil liberties under the grotesquely misnamed “Patriot Act” as well as other shenanigans they’ve gotten up to in the name of “Homeland Security”. (I’m assuming a true patriot has actually READ the Constitution.)