Anniversary: Sadness Follows Thirteen Years Later

September 11 again.

Last year, I was worried about how the world had remained a bloody, violent place since 2001 as the Syrian Civil War was well into its third year.  It's now in its fourth, and due to the extremist group ISIL it's bled over back into neighboring Iraq which still hasn't recovered from the ill-planned Bush/Cheney occupation.

Last night Obama gave a speech outlining how we were committing airstrikes against the Islamist State psychopaths.  We are remaking military commitments to a nation we tried to exit back in 2011, mostly because we as a nation failed to leave Iraq in better shape than when we invaded it in 2003.  Mostly because we dove head-first into a Middle East quagmire out of anger and blind rage.

We had no reason to invade Iraq in response to what Bin Laden did to us on 9/11.  The reasons were fabricated by a Bush/Cheney administration that wanted to invade Iraq for other objectives (finishing off Saddam, placating our allies in the region who didn't like having a dictator for a neighbor, seizing all that oil and natural resources).  We had no plan for what to do with nation-building.  Well, there was a plan: remove Saddam and his ilk, put in pet Chalabi on the throne, sign up all the oil rights, exit Iraq.  When it happened that nobody in Iraq wanted Chalabi and he wasn't the puppy Cheney thought he was, it turned out we had no Plan B.

Because with the Middle East there IS no Plan B.  Just an ongoing, 5000-year cycle of violence and madness that will only end when everybody's dead.

And we are all stuck.  The innocent people in the Middle East trapped between warring factions.  Other nations tied to the region through all that damn oil.  A United States that's morally and politically obligated to keep dropping itself into that quagmire because we've been breaking things there since World War II and we're stuck paying the bills for the next century.

We're bombing away in Iraq today.  Because the Towers fell thirteen years ago.  We have no idea when we can stop bombing.

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Should The Legacy of 9/11 Be More War?

Today is another remembrance of 9/11/01.  On this day we remember that 2,000-plus people lost their lives to 19 idiots seeking glory in death, ordered by another group of idiots who hid in a cave and didn't have the balls to do the deed themselves.

Today we remember that we as a nation launched a war on Afghanistan where those idiots were hiding, protected by a fundamentalist Taliban regime.  Today we have to remember that we're still in Afghanistan fighting those Taliban forces who will most likely re-seize power the second we leave, which is pretty much what the cave idiots want out of us: perpetual war.

Today we remember that we as a nation got lied to by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney regarding Iraq: that Saddam was tied in with those cave idiots (that was a lie), that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (that was a lie), that Saddam was a threat to Middle East security (the 1991 Persian Gulf war neutered his forces), that felling Saddam would bring peace and democracy to the Middle East (Cheney and Co. wanted to put Chalabi on the throne and leave a puppet regime in place).

This last remembrance is key, because it's a very good reason why a vast majority of Americans do not want our nation under Obama to go starting another military action in the Middle East.  On this day, we're thinking about Syria as much as we're thinking about the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and Flight 93.

The Syrian civil war is one of the messiest results of the Arab Spring of two years prior (the collapses of Egypt and Libya over this summer are starting to get as bad).  We've got 2 million refugees across the borders and 4 million more displaced within Syria: a massive humanitarian disaster in the making.  Adding to the problem is that the current Assad regime isn't a friendly or humane government... and that a growing number of Syrian rebel forces are tied into the Al Qaeda cave idiot extremists, meaning the U.S. really doesn't have an honest side to back.

The biggest headache is how Assad's government does have WMDs in the form of chemical weapons.  While warfare is a bloody mess regardless what weapons are used, chemical warfare is a Big No-No: the risk to civilian exposure is the biggest worry, especially since there's little warning when the attacks come and there's not a lot of people going around with gas masks.  When the fighting got worse, but the U.S. had no reason or allied support to go in, Obama issued a stern warning (the "red line") that chemical weapon usage would cause reprisals.

Chemical weapons got used.

Forced to uphold the "red line", Obama did what every other President seeking military action would do: call on allies to back him up.  This time, however, our allies refused.  In a public display of rejection, the British Parliament voted against the call for support.  Going to the UN for a military airstrike - missile or aerial bombing - was out of the question with Syria's backer Russia nearly certain to veto any action.

This brought him back to the U.S. going to Congress to ask for a resolution (something Presidents are supposed to do, but because of constitutional question marks they avoid this step).  This was originally viewed as the one thing the Republicans would actually back Obama on... except now there's no guarantee as the House GOP obstruction game-plan (destroy Obamacare, destroy Obama, destroy the government, etc) is back in full effect.

The worrying thing is how the knee-jerk reaction comes so easy on this: the urge to use military force as the first step rather than the last.  There is this lingering paranoia among our political leaders that nobody wants to look "weak".  That nobody wants to be accountable when something goes wrong, except for when a military strike could go wrong, in which case the answer would be an escalation in the fighting.

The current situation - the possibility of a diplomatic solution to the chemical weapons, it won't stop the fighting but it will reduce the need for the world power(s) to get further entangled - provides some hope for the present and the future.  If the United States can get Russia to back the effort, if Russia can get Syria to sign onto the chemical warfare treaties limiting their use, if Syria honestly gives up control of those weapons to international (UN) observers...  For the first time in what seems like decades, we would have a diplomatic solution to a problem rather than a military one.

And wouldn't that be a better legacy Post-9/11 than yet another war?

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A Repost of A Remembrance

I posted this back in 2009.  This is the tenth anniversary of the tragedy of 9/11.

I was at the main library in downtown Ft. Lauderdale meeting with other librarians in the tech lab (computers) departments. The library was switching to a new email system (groupwise) and they wanted us to perform the in-house training. Meeting started at 9 am. One of my coworkers was late, coming in and saying there was news a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers...
...When we finished the meeting, we left the classroom and walked out into the foyer area and up the escalator to the library’s main floor. They had dragged out a TV on a cart and was trying to get a signal. For some reason, TV reception was lousy in that building, and they didn’t have cable connection. I saw an old boss of mine who was also at the library for a meeting and approached her, asking what was going on. “Oh my God,” she told me. “There was another plane hitting the other World Trade Center tower.”
It took a few seconds. It took a few seconds to realize that one plane was an accident. Two planes, one right after the other… hitting each tower…
I knew then it meant war...

Not much has changed since 2009.  Except that our fighting in Iraq is lessened now that our military and political presence there has dropped.  The fighting in Afghanistan has increased, mostly through an attempt to finish the nine and a half years we've been there trying to keep the allies of Bin Laden from regaining power there.

A lot has changed since 2001, but most of it is due to political partisan BS that isn't appropriate to note during this somber moment.  The one thing I can note is that Bin Laden is dead, answering for his part in the attacks ten years ago among some of the other sins he'd committed the years before.  It may have been a bloody justice without the courtroom, but this was a man who admitted to his part and sought to commit more acts of war to prove himself mighty rather than decent.  It was a bloody justice but it was done.

We are as a nation today opening memorials at the ground of the World Trade Center, and near Shanksville PA.  There will be remembrances and muted celebrations across the country today.  There isn't much more to do other than mourn the dead and build again...

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