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Carefully
concealed in the theatrics of war, the bombast of propaganda,
and the lights and sirens of new security measures is the simple
fact that America has suffered an unprecedented defeat at the
hands of those armed with the most meager of weapons. It was a
defeat not only deeply humiliating in its character but totally
unnecessary in its origins.
These
facts are not erased by the moral failures of our foe. We have
not been the victims of the unpredictable, spontaneous combustion
of evil, but rather of a long series of missteps and misjudgments
of which the angry, bitter, and deranged simply took advantage.
Neither
can these facts be mitigated by a continued loyalty to the very
leadership that so endangered the country by its disastrous policies,
inadequate preparation, and taunting arrogance. What happened
on September 11 did not have to happen and until we face that
truth, and deal with its implications, we will live in fear and
danger.
Those
in power – in government, media, corporations, and academia –
have made terrible mistakes. If they had true capacity for shame,
most of the membership of the Council on Foreign Relations would
go into monasteries to repent, the editorial boards of the New
York Times and Washington Post would resign en masse,
and most members of Congress would have the good grace not to
run again.
These,
after all, are the people who have assured us that if we were
merely loyal enough to Israel, if we merely spent enough on the
military, and merely gave up enough rights in the name of security,
everything would be fine. These are the people who said it was
okay to build the largest buildings in the world without observing
the city fire code.
These
are not new mistakes. Our unbalanced Middle East policy has a
half century provenance, backed by the best and the brightest
that the American establishment could produce. They were dead
wrong. To this day, for example, the elite rhetoric on the subject
presumes an irreversible dichotomy in the Middle East, as though
it is impossible to be simultaneously as fair and decent to Arabs
as it is to Israelis.
And
it's far from just a matter of intellectual error. For decades
a sane military policy has been subverted by a voraciously greedy
defense industry with its Vichy enclaves in the Pentagon where
tens of billions of dollars are misspent, misdirected, or just
plain missing. For decades, criminal or corrupt combinations have
infested our politics – including Watergate, Iran-Contra, and
the Arkansas Mafia – badly distorting direction, destroying integrity,
and damaging programs, including those designed to protect the
citizen in times of emergency. For decades a corporate coup against
democracy has been underway subverting both our domestic and foreign
policies. Throughout this period a culture of impunity has arisen
among our leaders that permits them to function outside the constraints
of our constitution, ideals, or traditions. And throughout this
period, the major media have preferred to share in the power rather
than to speak the truth.
America,
under this tawdry, corrupt, intellectually vacuous, and morally
decadent leadership, became an extraordinarily easy mark. Easy
to hate, easy to target, and easy to attack.
Blaming
bin Laden for taking advantage of this does not add one iota to
either our sanity or our safety. Neither does applauding those
whose arrogance, ignorance and carelessness led us to this disaster.
They should not be cheered but accused, called to account, and
judged severely. Only when we start to understand how we got in
this mess will we start to find the way out.
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