Fighting the President's War Will End Only in Further Tragedy, Increased Hatred
By Michael Owen
Opinions Editor

The present controversy over the Bush Administration’s emerging interest in preemptive war—an interest elevated, from its dubious beginnings as “retaliation” against Afghanistan, to the shrine of foreign policy—deserves some mention in its own right. But perhaps more disturbing than the move toward American-initiated warfare is the progressive spread of silence among the American public. Despite unambiguous opposition to war in Iraq by prominent voices in government and media worldwide, the Administration seems dead-set on, and popularly unopposed in, reviving the “patriotism” (or, more cynically, the lack of resistance to a distinctly troubling administrative agenda) brought about by the collapse of an American symbol.

Words have not yet described the scale of the September 11 terrorism, because whenever they might have done so they have been preceded in a sentence by the phrase, “words cannot describe.” The “incalculable” loss of a year ago is now quite calculable; both the death toll (in number of persons) and the extent of material damage (in number of dollars) have been calculated with robotic precision, and lest there should remain an unquantifiable emotional loss, the media has tortured the subject to a point, improbably, beyond saturation. If there was a true sense of emotional loss in the beginning, it has been numbed by the drone of a machine whose work, though ostensibly to process the horror, has done nothing but exploit it cheaply to impossible extremes.

Those who cling to the idea of an incalculable devastation on September 11 do so in reverence to the sense of entitlement that should have been, but was not, jettisoned on September 11.

America has spent the past year licking its wounds and shooting, from the hip, at the “evil” Bush vowed to eliminate, but it has not learned the lesson it might wisely have taken from its 9/11 crucible: America cannot continue to pretend as though the rest of the world is irrelevant.

The destruction of the Twin Towers was an unprecedented spectacle in the collective imagination of contemporary America, and it caught America’s attention unprecedentedly. The Towers’ fall was the first widely-seen devastation on a scale proportionate to the ambition, technical genius and, some might say, ego of the past half-century. In the minds of many Americans, it was a deeply impersonal event coupled with a deeply personal one; we dissociated the stories of those who died from the horrific magnificence of the Towers’ fall. By no means should the loss of human life be subordinated to the loss of an architectural construction—the human loss should remain forever in the realm of the sacred and sorrowful. And yet the human loss has been subordinated, in the media and elsewhere. When President Bush speaks of the event, he adeptly places the focus of his remarks on the “human loss” and the “human toll.” What remains unspoken is the value of the indelible vision of September 11 to those who would exploit it as such; their real platform is not the loss of life, but the loss, literally, of unquestionable structure.

In a time of relative perceived security, Americans were dulled to the senselessness of our own relationship with the rest of the world. Our lifestyles, speaking broadly, were characterized by increase and enormity and excess. Post-9/11, we briefly questioned our worship of the material, but it was not long before we had returned to a tacit acknowledgment and acceptance of our irrational lives. A year later we commemorated the loss with flags, the seductive idols of nationalism. As long as we implied patriotism with the bumper-sticker adornments of our SUVs, we could remain inured to the real world; how ironic, that we should so soon forget.

It is a troubling end to a troubling year. We question less now, offering no obstacles to our leaders’ manipulative, reckless international policy. The world stands opposed to our urge to carry war wherever it will most likely yield a politically marketable success. Characterize the perpetrators of the attacks as you will, but they are not the faceless villains fed to us by a government rejoicing in and feeding our jingoism; the motives behind 9/11—hatred, fear, resentment—remain steadfastly in place. As we continue, more impetuous than ever, in this campaign of worldwide aggression, our complacency condemns us. We, the people, will lose this war.