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<\/p>\nNobody who was old enough to remember has forgotten 9\/11.<\/p>\n
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The idea that people will forget the actual event is the least of my worries, to be honest.<\/p>\n
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My worry? \u00a0That the US, 14 years later, has learned all the wrong lessons.<\/p>\n
America; Heck Yeah<\/strong>: \u00a0Too many of my conservative allies think that military strength,\u00a0qua\u00a0<\/em>military strength, along with adopting a siege mentality expressed in TSA lines and an ever-more-rapacious internal spying apparatus, is the answer.<\/p>\n It’s not that we don’t need intelligence – or, for that matter, security (not that the CIA, NSA, or TSA are good at either one).<\/p>\n But the trickle-down effect of all of this official hypervigilance is that, to way too many in official America, it’s a short jaunt from “we’ve got to stop terrorists by all means necessary”…<\/p>\n …to “we’ve got to stop\u00a0anything and everything\u00a0<\/em>that gets in our way by all means necessary.<\/p>\n We, the People, pay (a lot) for security. \u00a0We should not be considered vassals as part of the bargain.<\/p>\n Peace Through Smugness<\/strong>: \u00a0My Libertarian\u00a0friends, if anything, learned an equally fallacious\u00a0lesson; the idea that if we just keep our nose out of everything, everywhere, everyone else will return the favor. \u00a0Thence, they turned to a “foreign policy” stance dominated almost entirely by slogans and photo-memes…<\/p>\n …designed to give a bunch of people with a very dubious knowledge of history a set of extremely simple chanting points to repeat endlessly.<\/p>\n They – and I’m just talking about the smart ones, here, not the unseemly number of Libertarians who are busily buzzing about conspiracy theories and endlessly re-looping the\u00a0collapse of Building Seven today – seem smitten with the notion that since ISIS hasn’t attacked us, and Iran hasn’t attacked \u00a0Israel\u00a0yet<\/em>, they never will<\/em>. \u00a0Tell me, Ronulans – what “war propaganda” brought war to the Kurds? \u00a0The Yazidi? \u00a0The Lebanese Christians of 1980? \u00a0The Norwegians and Danes and Dutch and Belgians and Letzenb\u00fcrgers of 1940? \u00a0\u00a0The Jews of 1936 (not that all of you believe it happened)? \u00a0The Ukrainians of 1933? \u00a0 The Armenians of 1915? \u00a0The Native Americans, for that matter, from 1776 to 1890? \u00a0What “lies” did any of them tell that led to their being attacked, conquered, murdered? \u00a0 And chanting “it’s all\u00a0still\u00a0<\/em>government’s fault” dodges the question so ludicriously that I, for one, had to answer it in satire<\/a>, the only medium that\u00a0allows us to give this sort of “reasoning” the response it is due.<\/p>\n And that’s not even to say that they, or even Ron Paul, are wrong; there is absolutely nothing wrong with\u00a0restrained\u00a0<\/em>peace through strength. \u00a0 Even Ron Paul said as much\u00a0– although that’s a quote some of his more monomaniacal\u00a0personality cultists miss, as they chatter on calling\u00a0most of the GOP candidates for president “warvangelicals” – as if showing Iran that one is more than willing to meet aggression with aggression isn’t the right idea; as if “government” is the sole problem, and human nature is irrelevant, and “evil” doesn’t exist and\/or is manifested solely through government.<\/p>\n “Hell No! \u00a0We Won’t Reason!”: \u00a0<\/b>And all of them – the conservative security zealots, the Ron Paul personality cult – at least learned to defer, respectively, to security and freedom.<\/p>\n Our loathsome left,\u00a0after latching onto the move to invade Iraq with both hands, then flipping when the war got complicated, then flopping\u00a0back after the surge stabilized the situation, then vicariously sharing in the Nobel Prize that The Lightworker “won” for continuing the Bush policy (with more drones, natch), then washing their hands of nightmare that ensued (exactly as predicted in this space) when Obama, eager to cash an economically negligible but politically succulent “peace dividend”, pulled the troops out long before it was advisable, but exactly after using the US’s dubious diplomatic savvy to destabilize Syria and Libya and Yemen, leaving them ripe for ISIS\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>the Iranians.<\/p>\n No matter to them; the \u00a0whole thing has given the Big Left the opportunity to re-live its glorious youth – the sixties and seventies, when the anti-war movement shouldered the “America First” Democrats out of the spotlight, and did to the Vietnamese…<\/p>\n …pretty much what President Obama and Secretaries of State Clinton and Kerry have been doing to the Libyans, the Syrians, the Iraqis, the Kurds.<\/p>\n So what has the left learned? \u00a0 \u00a0Never waste a crisis.<\/p>\n So it’s the 14th anniversary of 9\/11. \u00a0Where are we?<\/p>\n I’m almost afraid to ask.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/extras.mnginteractive.com\/live\/media\/site36\/2013\/1102\/20131102__20131104_C8_C8-BZ04TKWORD~p1.jpg\")
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