A countervailing view of 9/11 from a neo-liberal

Recently, I trekked northward from Utah to visit friends, enjoy Big Sky country, and to see some glaciers before they’re all gone. Accelerated global warming due to burning fossil fuels? Nah! Ridiculous!

I was even pleasantly surprised by The Daily Inter Lake — a well-composed small-town paper featuring a nice balance of local and national news. I wasn’t surprised to discover a mostly conservative line on the editorial page and even agreed with much of what I read there.

What I didn’t expect, however, was a virulent attack on liberals by a former leftie, Daily Inter Lake editor Frank Miele, himself probably the descendant of Italian immigrants like mine given his surname which means “honey” in our ancestral tongue. It’s interesting, however, how life’s events can mold us in opposite directions.

My grandparents became New Deal-hating Republicans upon gaining citizenship perhaps because they opened a grocery store in a prosperous New Jersey town after arriving and wanted to fit in with their wealthy industrialist neighbors and clients. The orientation stuck, however. Dad was Republican, and I voted GOP in every presidential election from 1972 until 2000 when I cast a ballot for Nader mainly because in Utah, Republicans don’t even need to campaign to win, and some of what Ralph was saying was beginning to make sense to me.

Like Miele, I got a degree in liberal arts (two of them, in fact) and taught Italian for four years at a major university. Then financial realities and a growing family prompted me to go to work in sales for some of America’s largest corporations, and I uncritically bobbed along in the conservative flow for most of my life.

Then, however, the same watershed event that swung your editor to conservatism caused me to completely lose faith in it. I woke up the morning after 9/11 not asking myself what can we do to get back at these “terrorists” but wondering what could have possibly motivated them to commit such a desperate act in the first place.

Why would so many young men sacrifice their lives to strike at a nation in such a dramatic fashion? Was it the promise of 72 afterlife virgins? That seemed contrived and at best some “icing on the cake.”

Was it because they “hate us for our freedoms” as our commander-in-chief was saying? That seemed like even a bigger stretch given the fact that their rhetoric blamed us for suppressing their freedoms.

My research revealed that most Muslim radicals take inspiration in trying to stop what they perceive to be “American imperialism.” Our nation with only 5 percent of the world’s population consumes 25 percent of its energy, and historically we’ve not been shy about employing shady or violent means to make sure nothing interrupts its flow.

In 1953, CIA agents helped overthrow a popularly elected Iranian prime minister who might have rocked our oil boat. The revolutionary coming-to-power of a fundamentalist Islamist cleric, the Ayatollah Khomeini, 26 years later was motivated by that bit of meddling and by our continued backing of an American puppet instead, the shah of Iran.

Ronald Reagan and George Bush the First had armed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein when they thought he was a compliant and useful tool in countering revolutionary Iran, but Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1989 had an unintended consequence. When Bush Sr. (in order to reestablish the flow of oil and not have it sourced from too few hands) expelled the secular Saddam from Kuwait, it infuriated Islamic militants who actually wanted to do that job themselves without the help of the Americans and other non-Muslims entering and polluting a land they consider sacred, Saudi Arabia.

One such offended Saudi Islamist was Osama bin Laden who we also had armed with advanced shoulder-fired, anti-aircraft missiles to repel the Soviets from their nine-year occupation of Afghanistan beginning in 1979. Osama nearly took out the World Trade Center in retaliation with a truck bomb in 1993, so it’s not like we didn’t know he was coming. Clinton had at least tried to take him out. “W” did nothing.

It should have also been clearly evident that Osama would continue to employ non-conventional methods (some call it asymmetrical warfare) given his lack of conventional weapons to take on U.S. military forces head to head. When looked at from that perspective, the 9/11 attacks were brilliantly conceived and executed by exploiting security glitches in our own technological systems and turning them against us to strike at the very heart of U.S. power… the financial establishment (the World Trade Center), our military (the Pentagon), and our political system (don’t forget that the fourth plane was headed to the Capitol Building).

Our response to 9/11, however, was more an effort to re-establish wounded American pride and dominance than it was a move to seek justice and establish a peaceful order. Bush II squandered the opportunity to take out Osama in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains in 2001, and he took his eye completely off the ball by invading the wrong country, Iraq, in 2003.

The point I’m making is that when examined carefully, 9/11 is not really a manifestation that there exist only good and evil in the world as Frank Miele seems to suggest but that we humans are highly capable of observing the same “facts” and justifying ourselves as “good” and others as “evil” depending on how we interpret them. The irony is that bitter enemies can hold the same opinions of righteousness about themselves and venality on the part of their perceived enemies. Nazi troops had the phrase “Gott Mitt Uns” (God is with us) engraved on their belt buckles. However, a simplistic, dualistic world view which attempts to label everything as either good or evil rarely yields anything but continued conflict as we have seen ever since that fateful September day almost 11 years ago.

So I’m inviting Frank Miele to consider toning down his acid pen a bit and stop labeling liberals as allies of those who would do us all harm. Such thinking is naive, spiteful, and ignores the reality that “terrorism” is a complex issue that deserves a well-reasoned response instead of just firing a few more Hellfire missiles from Predator drones. Such U.S. “responses” cause collateral damage (like killing innocent civilians) which radicalizes coming generations of young people to attack us with even more “terrorism.” It’s the same kind of passion that the crumbling buildings of 9/11 instilled in Miele who should at least be aware that many of today’s lefties are critical of the militant leadership in both major political parties, and some of us no longer support either.  

After leaving Kalispell, I had the pleasure to meet briefly Montana’s Democratic governor and your Republican lieutenant governor, and we commiserated about the regrettable Supreme Court decision that just struck down your state’s anti-corruption law. Maybe if we liberals and Frank Miele’s conservative friends can find common cause in such issues we can forget about who’s evil and who’s sitting at the right hand of God.  

Jim Catano is a freelance writer and editor operating out of Salt Lake City, Utah.