Twenty Years Later, It's Time to Move On.
Never forget. Those words have been repeated over and over across the United States since the planes crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon twenty years ago today. That day changed the country forever, and not in a good way. What do we have to show for “Never Forget?” Did we make strides as a country to be kinder to each other? To care more for each other? Absolutely not. The end result has been almost entirely negative. The terrorist attacks that took place that day cost approximately $500,000 to carry out. Looking at the state of our society today, it is clear that Osama Bin Laden got a return on his investment beyond his wildest dreams.
Within months of the attack, the United States had special operations teams on the ground in Afghanistan. Before a year had passed, we initiated a full-on invasion. What did this accomplish? Twenty years later, over 2000 Americans have died as part of the occupation. Over 171,000 Afghans died as a result of our invasion. We spent $2 trillion in the process. And now, on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the Taliban are in full control of the entire country having destroyed both the ANA/ANP forces we trained as well as the Northern Alliance in Panjshir. It was all a completely pointless waste of money and life that did nothing to meaningfully check the spread of terrorism or get revenge on the people responsible for the attacks. Ten years into the occupation of Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden was found and killed by U.S Navy SEALs. In Pakistan. He was found by a combination of luck and an anonymous tip. Not intelligence gathered on the ground in Afghanistan or extracted through enhanced interrogation of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.
Two years later we invaded another country: Iraq. The reasons for doing so were flimsy at best. Anyone with half a brain knew that the CIA report on WMDs was absolute nonsense; crafted to tell the ghouls within the Bush administration exactly what they wanted to hear. The media ran with it and supported it not because they believed the reports to be true (they didn’t), but because they didn’t want to appear unpatriotic in the wake of 9/11. Never Forget needed more blood and decisive action. Iraq was the next place to go get it. By December of 2009, over 4,200 Americans had died in Iraq. over 110,000 Iraqis had died as the result of the invasion. And $1.1 Trillion had been spent on yet another failed war. As the United States failed to build a functional Liberal Democracy in Afghanistan, so too did it fail in Iraq. Shortly after the American withdrawal in 2012, Islamic State surged to power in the greater region, bolstered by the aimless castoffs of Sadam’s army and morphed into a monster far worse than the Ba’ath party. This was a direct result of the American occupation. IS itself was in many ways nothing more than the bastard child of the Coalition’s sins. “But what about Al-Qaeda?” While it is true that AQ did make their “final stand” against America in Iraq, they only showed up there a few years after we did. We didn’t go there to fight them. They went there to fight us. And even then AQ lived to fight another day. During the conflict against IS, they would go on to receive close air support and material funding under the alternative names of Al-Nusra and later HTS. Eventually the American government would go on to admit that HTS was an American asset. Once again the lives expended fighting AQ were thrown away in vain as they would later become allies of convenience in the mess we made of the region.
The cost at home within America has been far less bloody but no means inconsequential. In the wake of 9/11, Congress passed a law allowing the airlines to charge baggage fees in the name of “bouncing back” from 9/11. They also formed a new agency we now know as the Department of Homeland Security (which itself sounds incredibly Soviet), and the Transportation Security Administration; an agency responsible for security at airports designed to exist outside of the standard GS pay structure to save money. The result is you now need to submit to being groped by someone with questionable training that makes poverty level wages and lives to exercise their limited bureaucratic authority to make the general public miserable in the way that all petty tyrants in such positions do like those at the DMV. The experience of traveling through airports is worse than it has ever been and bypassing this costs money, a federal background check, and an interview. Yet this security theater has done nothing meaningful to make us safer. Multiple security tests have revealed that TSA agents miss contraband items such as firearms in carryon luggage as much as 50% of the time. We are now subjected to long lines, inscrutable rules, and violating searches in return for nothing. The direct individual security experience while traveling increasingly resembles something you would see in an authoritarian police state and we have reaped no tangible benefit in exchange for surrendering these freedoms. Getting on a plane means agreeing to allow yourself to be stripped naked by a backscatter x-ray machine yet people frequently accidentally/intentionally bring knives on to planes; the same tools the 9/11 hijackers used.
Of course there are the less visible costs as well. By that I mean the rise and normalization of large scale domestic surveillance. The PATRIOT act was quickly passed in the wake of 9/11 and gets renewed with near unanimous bipartisan support. Not only did this law give the federal government broad powers to surveil American citizens within the borders of the continental United States, it also granted the government the ability to detain people without charge for up to 90 days if there was “reasonable suspicion” that they could be merely linked to known terrorists. The Snowden leaks in 2012 further revealed something that U.S Senator Ron Wyden had long alluded to: the fact that the federal government itself had a classified interpretation of what power it believed the PATRIOT act granted it. This was the true gift of 9/11. A series of laws that vastly expanded the ability of the government to detain and watch people, and a government that itself believed that what those laws actually meant was a secret that only select people should be able to know. For a country that is supposed to have a transparent government such a change is outright psychotic, yet in the name of “Never Forget,” the American public just rolled over and accepted it.
Most people responded to the Snowden leaks with a shrug, and at this point in time Americans across the political spectrum seem to view the man as a traitor that compromised national security rather than a hero that sacrificed a very comfortable life to reveal to the public the massive scale of the surveillance state. No one cared that the NSA was passing off intercepted communications that had nothing to do with terrorism or national security to federal law enforcement who would go on to reverse engineer investigations and present them to prosecutors with no mention of NSA involvement. No one cared that NSA employees were scraping private photographs from intercepted emails and passing them around the office, or using the NSA’s powerful surveillance tools to monitor people they personally knew. Snowden revealed that the national security component of the country had grown into a perverse and out-of-control deranged hydra, and no one cared because of “Never Forget.” This surveillance has only been further expanded in the form of the “Five Eyes” program: an intelligence-sharing agreement between the U.S, U.K, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand wherein everyone spies on each other’s citizens and then shares the information thus circumventing what few protections against domestic surveillance still exist within those countries. Our allies have been tainted by the Global War on Terror after all as well and the rise in the use of large scale domestic surveillance in those countries reflects it.
Even the cultural implications of “Never Forget” have been pathetic and disastrous. American media has become increasingly jingoistic in the twenty years that have passed since that day. The rogue independent hero has increasingly been replaced by the government man keeping the public safe by ignoring things like the Constitution and basic civil rights. Popular TV shows like Person of Interest and Homeland (former president Barack Obama’s favorite show) depict this new surveillance state and the increasingly invasive directions it could go in as a good thing that makes people safe.
This obsession with the people waging the war on terror has morphed into something even stranger and more perverse over time as well in the form of “operator worship” culture. The global war on terror has created a bizarre cultural obsession with the people responsible for doing the dirtiest parts of waging it. One of the most popular video game franchises in America, Call of Duty, morphed from being a series about historical conflicts to one set in wars that are currently ongoing. Players take on the roles of Marines and special forces operators fighting terrorists in the Middle East and even here in America. The most recent modern entry (but not the first game in the series to show such things) 2019’s Modern Warfare outright depicts people aligned with the player character torturing a terrorist for information. As the scene escalates you eventually drag the terrorist’s wife and child into the room and threaten them with a gun to get him to talk. While the game allows you to choose whether or to participate, it absolutely allows you to take part and murder the terrorist in cold blood once you get the information you want. Yes, the people doing this are SAS operators. They aren’t Americans. That doesn’t matter. The pep talk Captain Price gives the player about how doing evil shit like this is necessary to keep the world safe could just as easily come from an American and in plenty of media it frequently does.
Operator worship culture has normalized war crimes in the American zeitgeist. It’s telling that former Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, a man put on trial for war crimes, somehow managed to turn the publicity from said trial into becoming a social media influencer with brand sponsorships and podcast appearances. He even appears in the comment sections of other meme accounts run by “operators” where he constantly jokes about how maybe he really did exactly what he was accused of. To anyone that isn’t neck deep in that bizarre and depraved community, that sort of behavior is sickening. The worst part is it’s not mostly special operations personnel or even people with military backgrounds. Many of these pages' audiences consist almost entirely of teenage groupies that grew up playing Call of Duty and watching Navy SEALS on the history channel. They engage because they want to grow up to be operators. They turn to these people for life advice. They parrot their political opinions. They get involved in bizarre slapfights between different egotistical wackjobs that don’t give a single fuck about all of the people paying attention to them. We have a generation of young men forming bizarre parasocial relationships with people that celebrate and normalize war crimes. This is not okay or normal. It should not be treated as such.
In a sick twist of irony, the real heroes of 9/11, the first responders that ran into the towers, barely get any recognition at all in this dialogue. Just securing medical coverage for all of the first responders with severe chronic illnesses as a result of exposure to toxic dust at Ground Zero was an uphill battle that took decades to secure basic benefits for the people that actually stepped up during the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. Never Forget has destroyed us. It has consumed our culture. Eaten away at our liberty. Worsened our reputation the world over. After an enormous tragedy we had a chance to come together and put aside our differences. Instead we lashed out at people that had nothing to do with it and destroyed much of what made America great in fear that such an event would happen again. Twenty years later we need to ditch the tee-shirts,bumper stickers, mugs, and commemorative bottles of wine. It’s time to move on.