President Obama said the day of the 9/11 anniversary that in the decade following the 9/11 attacks, Americans have preserved our values and our character. He’s right. America’s history is of a whiny, over-privileged, self-aggrandizing and self-victimizing bully, and the . . . → Read More: If you really loved America, you would have died on 9/11]]> All of your woes can be traced to that one moment of missed opportunity.

President Obama said the day of the 9/11 anniversary that in the decade following the 9/11 attacks, Americans have preserved our values and our character. He’s right. America’s history is of a whiny, over-privileged, self-aggrandizing and self-victimizing bully, and the decade since 9/11 has been clarifying.

Of course that’s not what Obama meant. He meant that appearances to the contrary, America is not a nation of torturers, bullies, shrieking cowards and bomb-flinging xenophobes.  Not a nation that glorifies the work ethic while scorning the worker. Not a nation that worships the wealthy and demonizes the poor. Not a nation that saves its banks and leaves its ordinary citizens to fend for themselves in an economic wasteland.

I was living in Hawaii, 5000 miles from New York City, when the planes flew into the towers. Hawaii, even Honolulu, often seems to have little connection with the United States—more like a self-governing colony, possibly a dependent, but not a state. Most of the people I talked to about the attacks on the day and in subsequent weeks regarded them as horrifying and tragic but not as an assault upon themselves as citizens.

It was a distant disaster. Not so for everyone, of course, but for a lot of people. I remember reading a letter to the editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin from a woman, I think from Michigan, who had been forced to overstay her Hawaii vacation while the flights were grounded. She was resentful because so many businesses in Waikiki weren’t flying American flags in the tragedy’s wake.

Maybe that’s a product of Hawaii’s history, with barely more than a century passed since the forcible US annexation of the country, and less than a half century passed since statehood. Maybe it’s the prime chunks of real estate still occupied by the US military, who were, in even more recent memory, using a historically and religiously significant island for target practice.

The idea that the attacks were a response to US behavior seemed immediately plausible in a place where US behavior had recently been considerably less than ideal. Empires breed resistance; the difference between the US empire and ones that preceded it is that ours exists in a day when attacking the imperium on its home ground is relatively easy.

A few years ago, New York Times resident moron Tom Friedman allowed as how Americans had collectively gone nuts after 9/11. Certainly he did, and a lot of other people did, but not everyone. Anyone who didn’t go nuts, though, and went public with their sanity, could count on being scorned and marginalized and bullied by the hysterics and cowards who came into their own on that day.

God has taken center stage. The first words Obama spoke at the ceremony were a fragmentary quote from Psalms: “The Bible tells us — “weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”

The full line is “For his anger endureth but a moment; in His favor is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” Linking 9/11 to God’s wrath is something one might, a few years ago, have expected more from Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson and less from Barack Obama. But here we are.

Obama closed his speech as he began it, reprising the quote from Psalms and saying, “With a just God as our guide, let us honor those who have been lost, let us rededicate ourselves to the ideals that define our nation, and let us look to the future with hearts full of hope.”

Obama is not a careless orator, or a thoughtless one. Bookending the speech with quotes from the Bible, ending it with a shoutout to God as the guide for our nation, wasn’t an accident. It was an homage to the fundamentalist conception of a Christian nation, and it’s the last thing anyone listening, of any religion or none, should have wanted to hear.

But here we are.

If 9/11 was, as so many people wish it to have been, the fuel for this country’s terrible beauty, then let’s mark it as that. Let’s make a monument of an endless loop of the towers standing on that clear day and then hit and then tumbling down upon the dead, and sell tickets so the fools who wish for some sort of glory arising from the day can fling themselves on the eternally smoldering rubble and hope that their deaths may one day precipitate the same kind of homicidal desperation among the people whose fears and anger matter in this land.

Thank you, good night and God bless this Blog.

Updated 9/24 to resolve a point of theological distinction: originally I described the opening line as including a quote from a Christian psalm.

In an editorial . . . → Read More: Today, we are all cheese-eating surrender monkeys]]> The New York Times editorial board chooses the not-quite-successful-yet six-month effort to kill Muammar Gaddafi or chase him out of Libya as an occasion to scold our NATO friends; Barack Obama runs recent history in Iraq and Afghanistan through the scrubber; David Ignatius gives Tom Friedman a run for the money.

In an editorial entitled “NATO’s Teachable Moment“, the Times editors decry the degree to which the UK and France had to rely on the US to fill gaps in the NATO supply of munitions and accessories such as AWACs (Airborne Warning And Control System) aircraft during the six-month campaign against Libya. It is evidence, they say, that those countries are overly and unfairly reliant on the US war machine.

They also resurrect former US secretary of war Bob Gates’s hilarious warning that NATO countries “risked becoming militarily irrelevant unless they stepped up investment in their forces and equipment.”

To Gates and the editorial board, that’s a shameful future. But I ask you: could there possibly be any more cheerful fate in this day and age than to become militarily irrelevant?

The editorial closes ominously, with the editors asking, “If it was this hard taking on a ragtag army like Qaddafi’s, what would it be like to have to fight a real enemy?”

Let he who is without sin cast the first drone

What would it be like to fight “a real enemy?” Say, I have an idea: let’s all not find out.

The Times editors aren’t the only ones captured by a delusion or trying to sell one. Barack Obama used a speech at the annual American Legion conference to coin an awful designation, the “9/11 generation”, for military veterans of the past decade. Congratulations, veterans! We had the Lost Generation, the World War II generation, the Pepsi Generation and now, the 9/11 Generation.

Let’s hope the tag doesn’t stick. Who wants to be associated with an era characterized by a freakishly successful terrorist attack followed by a national psychotic break that engendered two wildly unsuccessful and violent occupations that have cost the US trillions and have most of the world saying “Fuckin’ Americans …”? Not to mention the torture and the surveillance state on steroids and the prosecutions of whistle blowers and whatever. Not to mention Operation Infinite War.

In the president’s view, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were over in a matter of weeks. It’s only the mopping up that’s taking a decade and change. He praised the veterans for toppling the Taliban and the Iraqi governments post haste. He said that they are “a generation of innovators” who have “changed the way America fights and wins at wars.”

“At wars” is a peculiar locution; it seems more suited for games. “At checkers, “at chess,” “at circumventing the Constitution” …

What’s really peculiar, though, is the “wins” part. It seems a bit on the dissociative side unless, like checkers or chess, the more pieces you collect the better you’re doing. In that sense we’re doing well; we have way more wars, or at least way more places in which we’re visiting serious violence upon the occupants, than we did when we started. So maybe the expression isn’t as odd as it seems.

The president said that US troops have “taken on the role of diplomats and mayors and development experts” and have “learned the cultures and traditions and languages of the places where they served.”

Mayors? If he says so; it seems weird to call a soldier from an invading/occupying army a “mayor.” The other things are true of some military personnel; many prefer to stick with the business of blowing things up and killing people, which is after all why we’re in those countries and also why diplomats and development experts are required among our soldiers. We wouldn’t need them if weren’t killing the people and blowing up their stuff.

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius—who is basically Tom Friedman with a sine wave—is begging questions apace with his betters and the best of his peers. He has a column up about potential hard feelings between incoming CIA head David “The Risen God” Petraeus and CIA analysts who say the US is stalemated in Afghanistan. Petraeus is more bullish on our prospects there because he’s the one who engineered the current state of affairs. Ignatius boils the conflict down to this:

How Petraeus manages this inevitable friction — reassuring the analysts while remaining faithful to his own views — will be closely watched within and outside the CIA.

In other words, the question isn’t whether or not Petraeus will blow off his analysts; only whether or not he can prevent an open rebellion among them when he does. Judging from his success in Iraq and Afghanistan, we could be in for a bloody few years at Langley.

Unlike Friedman, Ignatius has sources other than a lone, continent-hopping billionaire cab driver. His take is no doubt accurate. What makes it stupid is his failure to note that the relationship as he describes it is guaranteed to be completely dysfunctional. Is that a good thing? a bad thing? Apparently, it’s simply what it is, a thing too big to notice or judge.

Here’s a direct quote from Petraeus or Leon Panetta or some sacrificial general from sometime in 2012: “We’ve said all along that we face a challenging environment in Afghanistan and that our plans to draw down the number of US troops in the country have always been tied to conditions on the ground. That said, we’re making progress and we will continue making progress.” And then something about our Afghan allies stepping up to the plate.

Obama continues to insist that all US troops will be out of Iraq by the end of the year. At the same time he continues to negotiate the terms of an extended US presence. Perhaps he will change the designations of those who remain behind. Perhaps he will call them “Ambassadors of the 9/11 Generation” or “Mayors Emeritus.” Then he will have been honest, you see, as he will have been honest about the continued presence of mercenaries and government paramilitary personnel who were never formally “troops.”

Meanwhile, bully for England. Bully for France. The US reintroduced large scale wars of choice to the world and invested considerable time and resources into bribing and bullying our allies to accept the new order. By rights we ought to foot the bill for the consequent wars even when they’re not, strictly speaking, our own. Alternatively, we could renounce the practice and save everyone a bunch of money and, incidentally, preserve the lives of the people in those far off lands.

Ha ha.

Max Boot is my favorite neoconservative. He is completely unfamiliar with the concept of shame and like the rest of his clan he won’t ever . . . → Read More: What Max Boot learned about Libya from Afghanistan and Iraq]]> “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.”
       – Max Boot

Max Boot is my favorite neoconservative. He is completely unfamiliar with the concept of shame and like the rest of his clan he won’t ever flinch when it comes time to put somebody else’s life on the line. Anyone whose conscience survives initiation into that club soon gets voted out.

Where Max really shines is as a polemicist. He’s a good writer. He can turn a juicy phrase like few others. That one above, his juiciest ever—and I know writers, I know he looked at it and thought to himself, “damn, I am good …”—went into a piece he wrote for the Weekly Standard not long after September 11.

“The Case for American Empire” was, well, the case for American empire.

Many have suggested that the September 11 attack on America was payback for U.S. imperialism. If only we had not gone around sticking our noses where they did not belong, perhaps we would not now be contemplating a crater in lower Manhattan. The solution is obvious: The United States must become a kinder, gentler nation, must eschew quixotic missions abroad, must become, in Pat Buchanan’s phrase, “a republic, not an empire.” In fact this analysis is exactly backward: The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition; the solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation … [t]he question is whether, having now been attacked, we will act as a great power should.

Boot isn’t exactly the kind of man Stephen Colbert applauded in his tribute to George W. Bush—he’s not a man who “believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday.” He’s flexible. When he looks at Libya today, Boot doesn’t think that the US should do the same thing there as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan yesterday; he thinks we should do the same thing better.

[W]e must not limit our war aims to simply toppling Gadhafi. We made that mistake in Iraq and Afghanistan. By not paying attention to what comes after the deposal of a dictator, we inadvertently created conditions for a long-term insurgency. In Libya it is imperative that the U.S. and our allies make plans now to insert a stabilization force after Gadhafi’s downfall to help the National Transitional Council gain control of the country.

There’s nothing in the piece to top “jodhpurs and pith helmets.” How could there be? Boot is in the awful predicament of a man who knows that he long ago wrote the most memorable thing he’ll ever have written. But the gall of it is right up there with anything he said in connection with those other invasions even though he’s given up on empire and the heartache shows.

Needless to say, no one wants to see U.S. troops in another ground war – especially at a time of shrinking budgets and declining force size. The bulk of any such force in Libya should be provided by the Europeans since Libya is on their doorstep. But we can’t simply wash our hands of the place. The sooner we defeat Gadhafi’s forces and stabilize the country, the sooner we can achieve our objectives.

Er … yes. If one’s objective is to defeat Gadhafi and stabilize the country, then the sooner one does that the sooner it will have been done, and the sooner we can apply the lessons of Libya to whatever troubled land cries out to us next.

Naturally, Boot’s unblemished record of well-spoken idiocy has earned him a series of generous sinecures from varied and prestigious Institutions and Councils.