A Webdiary debate is unfolding on the causes of the catastrophe, and whether the United States must take some responsibility for it. This is a bitter and highly ideological debate, but one which, with good will, could inform us all. It is closely linked with the debate on the what form United States retaliation should take. Regardless of your position in these debate, we’re all talking like global citizens now, which, perhaps, is a good thing to come out of this nightmare.
I’m receiving far too many emails to publish, so I’ll chose representative contributors on the themes which emerge in the debate.
Contributors are: Jenny Conroy, Geoff Honnor, Risha Jorgensen, Aco Milosevski, Greg Weilo, Greg Berry, Jean Tilly, Julie Vella, Yvette Elliott, Alison Newman, KB, Michael Richardson.
Jenni Conroy, an Australian in Washington DC
As an Australian citizen living and working in Washington DC for the last 4 years I suddenly find myself with a very different view to those around me about what I hope happens next.
I watched the entire horrific chain of events unfold last Tuesday and could see the smoke of the Pentagon from my office building. It is certainly a tragedy of proportion that I hoped I would never witness in my life.
It has incited the spirit of American Patriotism here but my fear is that the strength and arrogance of this is going to cause global harm rather than create good. The American people certainly have a reason to feel that retaliation is warranted for these seemingly senseless actions but I truly hope that they do not take this course of action.
They can consider themselves incredibly lucky that these terrorists did target “American Icons” and did not target the USA’s many nuclear power plants, which these planes fly past everyday. The destruction of 4 of these would have caused a lot more long term damage and destruction to their country.
The American public sees this as an attack on their freedom. The very same freedom that allows them to supply weaponry at a profit to the very same countries that are being placed with the blame of this attack. This country has generally become one of self greed and self importance.
America should regain its role as one of the most intelligent countries as well as the most powerful. It should not retaliate with force but should make efforts to outfox those few evil forces that exist in the world today, saving the rest of us from unnecessary hardship and harm.
Geoff Honnor
Like many others my online time has been consumed with long traverses down the international email trails in search of people – and meaning – in the wake of the carnage. A swift visit today to the Webdiary – once the last best hope for considered, reflective commentary – left me reeling. Some people should have taken Mum’s advice about the limited options that present in terms of bereavement-related characterisation.
Nothing is more indicative of a half-arsed grasp of reality than the fact that the pathologisation of the US and all its deeds, has received, in some quarters, a new moral imprimatur in the wake of the extremist horror visited upon New York and Washington.
How can there be any justification whatever, whenever, by whoever, for what has occurred?
These events can’t be glibly excused by globalisation, capitalism or even plain old-fashioned envy.
This is the face of hatred. Naked and unadorned. I’d imagine that to be able to casually dispose of human life on a scale this vast, with singular disregard for individual or collective humanity, would require a rare degree of that less than multiculturally-appropriate quality – evil.
The US can and does behave badly. But it’s also an open, diverse and pluralistic society. More so than any other society on the planet. No other nation has ever dared to constitutionally enshrine freedom to the extent that the US has and nor has any other nation undergone the degree of self-scrutiny and critical analysis that commitment rightfully engenders.
The totality of American adventurism in Chile, Vietnam and Cambodia wasn’t the finger-pointing discovery of an outraged world. It was offered up to the world by Americans investigating their own heart of darkness, to a degree that no other society, including our own, has or would ever, permit.
This basic fact appears to have eluded the historical revisionists who delight in portraying the US as some bloody Messalina preying upon the peaceful, freedom-loving peoples of the world. These oppressed but delightfully diverse folk may have their minor little moral deficiencies
but it’s all the fault of globalisation, or capitalism or some external force. It’s absolutely nothing to do with being ruled by people who think that liberal democracy is a contemptuous weakness useful only for exacting a moral toll from countries rich enough and dumb enough to be hoist on their own liberal democratic petard.
Should we shut the door on people fleeing from a murderous regime like that of the Taliban? That question, understandably, has echoed in Australia for weeks. I’ve not heard the counter however. Why should the people of Afghanistan – and 100 other nation states – have to endlessly endure tyranny as their natural state?
Developing world governments do have the ability to choose liberal democracy. Virtually none of them do. They are, for the most part, built around a clan loyalty ethos that doesn’t encompass the broad communitarian accountability principle that we arrogantly assume to be the natural order of things.
For instance, no sooner had the self-righteous Western avengers of Big Pharma delivered cheap drugs to AIDS-stricken South Africa than that country’s government announced that it had no intention of supplying them anyway, at any cost. They can apparently live with mass death. It’s we who can’t.
Afghanistan has been riven by endless fractricidal clan warfare for centuries. The Taliban is but the latest group to fruitlessly attempt to impose some form of national control. It’s principal backers are the government of Pakistan – a nation itself born of sectional hatred and religious intolerance – and Usama bin Laden; a man who – irony of ironies – is a Saudi version of the familiar American over-privileged rich kid. A man whose only apparent interest is to kill people who offend him by virtue of vast wealth inherited from a family that made it’s money in the naughty old world of global oil.
That his dilettantish destructiveness could move to encompass crumpling planes – and thousands of lives – against tall buildings is certainly possible. To imagine that it could all be explained away by the perceived inequities of US foreign policy is truly tragic.
Risha Jorgensen In New Jersey, 30 miles from New York City
Dear Margo,
I write this letter as an American who has never been to Australia, and indeed,has no close ties to Australia. However, I have been following your paper’s coverage of this horror since early Tuesday afternoon (our time), when it was one of the few news outlets available on the web despite our overloaded communication systems. Even after other sites began to become reachable, I followed your coverage, appreciative of its thoroughness and timeliness. And I can’t express how much the outpourings of support and sympathy from the Australian people has meant to me over the last two days.
But then there has also been people who have been quoted in your paper (and in other media outlets in America and abroad) who have said that perhaps America deserved this attack. American imperialists have to reap what they sow. This is a result of the country’s actions in the Middle East, Iraq, the Balkans, Rwanda. America supports the deaths of innocents in Palestine, so why shouldn’t American innocents die as well?
Implicit in these statements is the thought that the people in those buildings in some way were responsible for the above actions. That the office workers of insurance companies, or the technicians for the telecommunication companies, or the visiting tourists, deserved this fate because they supported horrors elsewhere.
This is the sort of attitude that has brought me closer to tears in the last twenty-four hours than anything else, and also closer to laughter.
America, like all countries, has good people and bad people. More so than many, we have a mix of cultures, languages, religions, and political alliances. Muslims dies in those attacks, and non-Muslims who were of Middle Eastern descent, people who may not have agreed with the politics of the letter writers, or who may have. We can’t know for sure.
Many people from other countries, some of whom are America’s allies and friends, others who are not, died in the attack. Americans who had never left the country and who thought little of other countries, and those who travelled the world and tried their best to understand all peoples, died in the attack.
My country is a republic, and like most aspects of our lives and laws, our foreign policies are determined partially – but far from completely – by massed public opinion. That does not mean that everyone agrees with the final result.
Do the people who have sympathy towards the attackers truly believe that all of the American public supported the peacekeepers in Serbia? We can barely raise a majority to support gun controls on our streets!
Personally, I have always thought that our country’s support of Israel’s actions in Palestine is a travesty of justice, and when I can, I vote for leaders who agree with me. Sometimes they get into office, but often they don?t. What am I to do at that point? In civilized societies, we wait until the next election and try again. And I do.
And write letters to newspapers like yours, who despite the prejudices of a few people, has carried on with evenhanded and caring coverage of the deaths of thousands of people in a place far from your home. And again, I must thank those who have expressed their pain and sympathy to those of us to whom it is far too close to home.
Aco Milosevski
The city of Belgrade was continually bombed for 3 months by NATO but the world was not told of the number of innocent people killed, nor did we get heart wrenching stories of survivors or of loved ones that were killed.
Greg Weilo in Adelaide
There would be few people in the developed world who could have missed the saturation media coverage on the terrorist attacks in the US. There has been endless analysis of the who, what, when, where and how questions by countless experts from a multitude of countries. It seems that the most fundamental question gets the least attention: Why?
Nothing happens without a reason. Stock answers as “madness” or “insanity” or “evil” just aren’t adequate. Finger-pointing isn’t the ultimate answer either. Ultimately, free people and free nations cannot accept the notion that the causes of their fortunes or misfortunes always lie outside of themselves.
Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not one of the “Americans deserved this” crowd. I’m totally sympathetic to the innocent victims killed in the tragedy. Nothing can justify or excuse what happened. Nevertheless, I can understand the motivations of the terrorists even though I abhor the actions that resulted.
Few Americans seem to understand at all, and their Big Media isn’t helping. My opinions are best summarised by Harry Browne, and whose article is attached below. He seems to be one of your left-wing fellow travellers, and I suspect that I may disagree with many of his other views. Nevertheless, he is spot on with this issue.
The article is at http://www.antiwar.com/orig/browne2.html. It says:
The terrorist attacks against America comprise a horrible tragedy. But they shouldn’t be a surprise.
It is well known that in war, the first casualty is truth that during any war truth is forsaken for propaganda. But sanity was a prior casualty: it was the loss of sanity that led to war in the first place.
Our foreign policy has been insane for decades. It was only a matter of time until Americans would have to suffer personally for it. It is a terrible tragedy of life that the innocent so often have to suffer for the sins of the guilty.
When will we learn that we can’t allow our politicians to bully the world without someone bullying back eventually?
President Bush has authorized continued bombing of innocent people in Iraq. President Clinton bombed innocent people in the Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Serbia. President Bush Senior invaded Iraq and Panama. President Reagan bombed innocent people in Libya and invaded Grenada. And on and on it goes.
Did we think the people who lost their families and friends and property in all that destruction would love America for what happened?
When will we learn that violence always begets violence?
Teaching Lessons
Supposedly, Reagan bombed Libya to teach Muammar al-Qaddafi a lesson about terrorism. But shortly thereafter a PanAm plane was destroyed over Scotland, and our government tried to convince the world it was Libyans who did it.
When will we learn that “teaching someone a lesson” never teaches anything but resentment that it only inspires the recipient to greater acts of defiance.
How many times on Tuesday did we hear someone describe the terrorist attacks as “cowardly acts”? But as misguided and despicable as they were, they were anything but cowardly. The people who committed them knowingly gave their lives for whatever stupid beliefs they held.
But what about the American presidents who order bombings of innocent people while the presidents remain completely insulated from any danger? What would you call their acts?
When will we learn that forsaking truth and reason in the heat of battle almost always assures that we will lose the battle?
Losing our Last Freedoms
And now, as sure as night follows day, we will be told we must give up more of our freedoms to avenge what never should have happened in the first place.
When will we learn that it makes no sense to give up our freedoms in the name of freedom?
What to Do
First of all, stop the hysteria. Stand back and ask how this could have happened. Ask how a prosperous country isolated by two oceans could have so embroiled itself in other people’s business that someone would want to do us harm. Even sitting in the middle of Europe, Switzerland isn’t beset by terrorist attacks, because the Swiss mind their own business.
Second, resolve that we won’t let our leaders use this occasion to commit their own terrorist acts upon more innocent people, foreign and domestic, that will inspire more terrorist attacks in the future.
Third, find a way, with enforceable constitutional limits, to prevent our leaders from ever again provoking this kind of anger against America.
Patriotism?
There are those who will say this article is unpatriotic and un-American that this is not a time to question our country or our leaders.
When will we learn that without freedom and sanity, there is no reason to be patriotic?
Dr Greg Berry in Stockton, NSW
There has been quite a lot said recently on the intelligent media programs (I mean the programs that analyse causes and the complex matrix of cultural and political influences that impinge on events) about the US needing to take some responsibility for the recent terrible scenario because of its foreign policies and subversive activities over the years.
I would like to extend this idea and suggest that in some way we are all implicated to some degree in the developed world because of the ways in which we live our lives. Maybe we need to look at the way we use our resources and focus so much on how to gain an economic advantage over our fellow citizens in Australia as well as those in the ‘developing’ world.
This is not to exclude the responsibility of oppressive minorities in some of those countries. At times like this there is an even bigger tendency than normal to want to protect me and mine. What is needed now is an open hearted generosity and fearlessness.
Jean Tilly
This tragedy is in our backyard – or nearly. It is a manifestation of prejudice and of hatred. What has happened in New York is truly tragic, but then so is what is happening in many other countries.
Sanctions crippled Iraq and other impoverished nations can only see many actions of the United States as being anti-everything they stand for and believe in. Many peoples do not have the advantage of education, of daily media reporting, of a perspective on the world tempered by wealth, health and peace.
Many impoverished nations see only what they are shown. Many truly believe that Satan resides somewhere in the western world. Many in our world are only too eager to take up their banner.
Even in the light of the stark horror of the New York tragedy we must resist the temptation to blame immediately. Until we know, we must quieten our outrage. And even when and if we find out, we mustn’t sink into the easy wide abyss of hatred.
We all know in our hearts that this is where the horror is conceived and from there it is only a very short pathway to the birth of death, destruction and mayhem.
This day will truly be the test of the world’s wise men. If there is a god I hope he helps them.
Julie Vella
Can you tell me why America never asks itself this question: Why do others hate us enough to do such terrible things. Basically I seek to understand why the media broadcasts images of children cheering on the West Bank without any real analysis from any quarter.
No one is actually questioning why a country such as the USA which feels such an unending pride in its own virtue is hated by so many other peoples. Or is it simply part of the American psyche to need a demonised enemy whose motives are never questioned?
Yvette Elliott in South Perth, Western Australia
The crumbling of America’s symbols of strength are especially a shock for the generation that never experienced world wars, the sixties, Vietnam, the cold war. Because war has always been for many of the younger western world, out of sight, it has been out of mind.
World war could never happen to us. War on the news in Bosnia or Israel is war on another planet. We took for granted the stability of America. They send in their troops to help the ‘weaker’ nations, we measure our currency against theirs, America has always been for so many the king of the world, even if we hated it.
But this morning, after the shock has subsided just a little, I feel the loss of certainty. No longer do I feel protected by the Western world ‘safe haven’ of civilization. Perhaps with the crumbling of the twin towers, our duality has also crumbled. No longer are we separate from them, no longer are they aliens in another world, the war-torn, hungry ‘third world’. They are very much on the same planet as us. Now, surely, we can’t possibly ignore that fact.
From: Allison Newman in Gosford, NSW
Terrorism is one thing. 10,000 dead is another. A country can shrug off losing a plane load of people. They can ignore a building being damaged. But 10000 people dead is WAR! To put it into perspective, Australian casualties may be up around 70 in this attack on the US. This could be the biggest loss of AUSTRALIAN lives to terrorism ever! And we weren’t even the target!
With casualties of this magnitude, a nation must take immediate steps to defend itself. If the only viable option to do so is the destruction of the nation from which the attacks originated, then that is what must happen. And if nations provide sanctuary for people that launch this type of attack, it only adds extra fuel to the ‘nuke em till they glow’ argument.
I feel sorrow for the US. I feel sorrow for the ‘Free World’. I feel sorrow for all those poor innocents that are most likely going to die in the retaliation that the US will most certainly make, when their only crime was to not do enough to stop people from their nation conducting such ridiculously large acts of evil. But I hope that the retaliation is enough to make EVERY country take seriously it’s responsibility to hound down terrorists with great vigour.
No other solution will provide ME with protection from terrorist attack. Do I now have to fear for my life every time I board a plane, enter a large building, speak to a Yank? It is time for terrorists to be brought to heel. We of the Western world have played nice long enough. If the insane terrorists themselves won’t mend their ways, then the only target left is the governments that do not actively stamp out terrorism.
It’s not nice, but then, the bombing in Europe during WWII wasn’t nice either, but it was the only method the Allies had for bring Germany to heel. This time the enemy is terrorism, and the only way to stop such large scale terrorism is to make it impossible for the terrorists to poke their heads up ANYWHERE in the world, making it impossible for them to organise on such a scale.
If someone has a better realistic solution to stop terrorism that hasn’t already been tried (because all methods used to date were found wanting on Monday), I’d love to hear it. But I for one can’t conceive of any that will work better than forcing governments around the world to take full responsibility for the actions of their citizens.
KB, disappointed left activist
I am starting to wonder whether some of the attitudes and sentiments being expressed by the “left” across a number of sites
and media paint us in the same light that we try to paint the right. Jingo-ism works both ways and to look at an event such as the what happened in the US and say, “Great, the USA got what it deserved” makes us look like the bigots we regularly decry.
Noone deserves to have to make a decision such as should I die by jumping out of a 80th storey window or should I wait to be burnt to death.
It seems to be a common human behaviour when the big bully in the school yard gets kicked down everyone that was their victim cheers, but it only makes them as bad as the bully when they do so. Also more often than not, out of the victims a new bully emerges to take their place and to act in the same way as the former bully and sometimes worse.
What we should be doing now is to work within the changing paradigm of the world to encourage peaceful, considered, long term solutions to the issues that face us. Buying into the culture of retaliation gets us nowhere, and just makes the arms dealers richer.
Having had some time away from being involved with actively political groups and organisations,it has given me a bit of time to re-assess the way in which alot of the “alternative left” (of which I consider myself to be) operate.
It seems to me that a lot of people who have to some extent the comfort to live in societies that allow freedom of the press, civil liberties and an accountable court system just want to create conflict for the sake of it, they use whatever topical politics for a platform to show themselves to be hardcore, tough and fighting the system, regardless of how they might affect the people, or the situation that the issue is about.
I wonder how different the thoughts of some who have posted would be if they found out that someone they know has been killed when they were one their way to work, grabbing a coffee or just having a stroll around town and enjoying the day.
Michael Richardson in Kingsford, NSW
Should we be surprised?
I don’t think the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon was anything but the logical extension of the United States foreign policy and intervention over the last 50 years. I do not think it is justified and I do not excuse what was done and I do not want to belittle the suffering of the thousands who have probably died and the thousands more who have lost friends and loved ones.
However, the reality is this: America is not innocent. If it was an action taken by an extremist group from the Middle East then it is certainly not an unthinkable or unlikely event. US intervention in international affairs since the war has been motivated entirely by the desire to further or maintain economic power. International actions involving force or supply of arms is never made for humanitarian reasons.
We need to disabuse ourselves of this notion and wake up to the reality that politics is about one thing: the maintenance of power.
Why is America in the Middle East? Oil. If America withdraws support for Israel and Kuwait and oil is controlled in the Middle East by Arab nations then it is the Western world, and in particular the United States, that loses massive amounts of economic power.
America does not care about the people of Israel anymore than it cared about the people of South Korea, of Nicaragua, of Panama or of South Vietnam. Behave like a bully, hold parts of the world hostage with economic force and the threat of a powerful military and eventually one of the smaller kids will fight back.
Of course no one can take America on in full frontal attack. And, if you are this angry, this desperate to fight back, then what better way to bring a nation to its knees, to expose its fragility before the entire world than to strike into the heart of the basis of its power: trade.
This is a symbolic strike. This says “You who hold us hostage, you are not safe”. It says “You who are innocent are not innocent, you are complicit even if you are not aware of it”. It says “The economy can be stopped, international trade, the smooth cog of American business, American life, is not impervious or invulnerable”. It says “We can hurt your symbols of power with the symbols of your mobility, your transportation”.
America has acted the corrupt policeman in around the globe and is now experiencing the consequences of its actions. These actions are not justified but they are understandable. I can see WHY a terrorist group would do this. How do you hurt a bully so much bigger and stronger than you? You kick ’em in the spine when they’re not looking and run like hell.
I believe that a retaliation was bound to occur at some point in time and this, I think, may well be it (or the start of it, who knows?). You cannot wage war abroad – economic, covert or overt – without eventually suffering at home.
What saddens me most is that American retaliation will just cause more suffering elsewhere… but at the same time it is necessary, is it not?
It may seem that I am justifying or lauding the attack. I am not. What I am saying is that this is a logical repercussion of American foreign policy.
We are shocked and outraged when it is us – I say us, the white world of the west – because we are so high and mighty. I include myself and my country in this.
Did you know that 3 million people have died in the Congo since 1997? Did you know that massacres on a similar scale are a regular and barely reported occurrence in parts of Africa and Latin America? It only becomes 24 hour news when it happens in the heart of America.
Again, I am not trying to diminish the tragedy of what has occurred. I have barely slept, and that fitfully, in the last two nights. I have been dazed, disoriented and distressed. What I want to make clear is that this kind of thing (not as spectacular, not as symbolic, perhaps) happens with monotonous regularity in the developing nations of the world. But that it strikes home powerfully when it happens to us.
Perhaps this is a bitter and horrible way to raise our awareness of the suffering and violence that is perpetrated everyday throughout the world. Perhaps the Western nations so grieved and outraged of the events of recent days can now begin to feel that grief and outrage in other places around the world.
I don’t place myself above this. I know that I don’t know anywhere near enough about the violence I have talked about here. So I point my finger at myself as well.