Tag Archives: September 11 2001

Unity In a Divided Time

A long time ago my parents were suddenly awakened one Sunday morning by a neighbor’s phone call. “Turn on the radio,” the neighbor pled with my father, apparently herself awakened by bad news.

My parents did, of course, and learned of the attack on U.S. naval forces in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. Though Europe had been at war since 1939, many Americans hoped to stay out of this latest European confrontation. Europeans had been fighting for centuries, many figured, and it needn’t concern us. Now it did. Americans are rightly skittish about committing their young men and women to battlefields, but not when their own country is bombed.

One of the few other times I remember such unity was after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Virginia. Another plane crashed in Pennsylvania when passengers fought a fourth group of hijackers. I watched the newscasts that day on a TV screen at a U.S. consulate in Saudi Arabia, wondering how we would handle this awful challenge. Whether we correctly handled these attacks in the long run may be open to question, but for a long while, we were definitely united. Americans bought flags and gathered in patriotic groups and supported rescue groups and firefighters in New York City.

But how do we react to wrongs when they involve few of our own citizens, like the attacks in Israel and Gaza and Ukraine?

How do we remain united in working out these and other problems when we have such vastly different opinions about many issues, like abortion, aid for Israel, and immigrants?

Our country’s government is over 230 years old. We have almost foundered on different ideas, directions, and yes, sins, more than once, but we are still here. If we can learn one thing, it’s that we can continue only as we respect differences and continue to work together. We need each other, because none of us has all the answers.

Covid-19 and Fear

I was overseas with the U.S. State Department when the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks took place. My post was in Saudi Arabia.

We suffered confusion, fear, a changed game plan in the time after it happened. After a while, though, those of us at the U.S. mission began to draw closer and pull together. We developed a purpose, a reason for living, tasks to carry out.

I don’t think the fear ever left us, especially after the war with Iraq began, and our posts closer to Iraq began suffering scud attacks. We learned to respect that fear, but our purpose and our friendships helped us deal with it.

The sudden realization accompanying the growth of the Covid-19 virus reminds me of those times. At first, perhaps, a denial, or telling ourselves that it’s all going to be over with soon, no problem.

But, of course, regardless of how long this particular sickness lasts in its current form, our world is changed forever. We will have choices to make, hardships to deal with. We will have to deal with them and with losses, not only of friends but of old ways. We face the fact that we could die—any of us.

Of course, that’s true any day of our lives, but the current pandemic outlines that truth for us.

I think the degree of health of our communities will determine whether we win or lose this challenge. How well we are able to come together with our families, religious gatherings, small governmental bodies, and the like will, I believe, be the key.

Rush to Judgement

William Burns held a leadership position in the U.S. Department of State when terrorists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. In an article in politico.com (March 13, 2019), he speaks of that time when the country, reeling from shock, was deciding on responses to the attacks.

The title of the article is “How we tried to slow the rush to war in Iraq and why the lessons from my time in the Bush administration are relevant today.” It speaks of Burns’ attempts to come to terms with that time and the wrong decisions made.

Even as Burns watched from his office window at the plumes of smoke from the attacked Pentagon, he wrote in a memo: “We could shape a strategy that would not only hit back hard against terrorists and any states who continued to harbor them, but also lay out an affirmative agenda that might eventually help reduce the hopelessness and anger on which extremists preyed.”

In hindsight, we chose to hit back hard but tended to ignore the need to also craft a positive policy to reduce the factors that led to the attacks.

Burns writes: “In the 18 months that followed—that rare hinge point in history between the trauma of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq in early 2003—we took a different and ultimately disastrous course. This is a story of the road not taken, of the initial plan of coercive diplomacy in Iraq, which turned out to be long on coercion and short on diplomacy.”

Burns writes of how the campaign in Afghanistan morphed into a tragic focus on Iraq and became quicksand from which we are still trying to free ourselves.

In a memo from the time before the decision to invade Iraq, Burns wrote: “we needed ‘to show that we will finish the job [and] restore order, not just move on to the next Moslem state.’”

We did not finish the job in Afghanistan. While the work was unfinished there (and remains to this day) we moved on to Iraq, then Syria, and now Iran.

The hardliners won after 9/11, and they are continuing to win today in our policies on Iran. “The Iraq invasion was the original sin,” Burns writes. Unfortunately, we are still following the path begun then.

Power Off Here; Children Dying There

A windstorm blew through our island community this week. The power flickered off about ten in the evening. We went to bed under our quilts. By next morning, power was restored, as we expected. Safe in a peaceful community, we had never doubted we would again have heat and food and hot water.

But even as we waited, securely, for normality, recent scenes haunted me from Yemen, in the Middle East, where nothing is ever normal and children die a slow death from starvation.

We have taken the side of Saudi Arabia against Yemen, war ravaged for years, though few Americans have any idea about what is going on there.

The bloodletting is part of an ancient struggle, begun in the seventh century, between different branches of Islam—Sunni and Shia. Saudi Arabia is the Sunni leader. Iran, descendant of ancient Persia, is the Shia leader.

We’re mainly interested in the oil pumped from Saudi Arabia. That and the money we make from selling arms to them. Oh, yes, also, Iran has become public enemy number one, and we want Saudi Arabia’s backing against them.

Neither side is pure, of course.

Iranians stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 and imprisoned our diplomats for 444 days. They also sponsor Hezbollah, a political and militant group in Lebanon.

On the other hand, fifteen of the nineteen terrorists who attacked our country on September 11, 2001,were from Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia sponsors that war against Yemen.

You can blame either side, if you like.

For me, though, taking sides becomes irrelevant next to children slowly dying from starvation as helpless parents watch. Others have been bombed by weapons we sold to the Saudis.

I don’t care who you choose as your enemy, but what we have abetted and allowed is a sin against God.

You Can’t Return to the Past, Except Maybe in a Book

As a newbie U.S. Foreign Service officer in the early 1990’s, I remember my first assignment in Saudi Arabia as a marvelous adventure. It was as exciting as the stories I used to read in my childhood.

I visited exotic market places with new friends, walked through ancient ruins, and fell in love with Middle Eastern food. Once in a while I took leave to visit Europe, exploring countries I had only read about.

My career began before terrorism led to intrusive pre flight searches in airports. I traveled before airplanes became boxcars of pressed humanity.

In the course of my job, I learned to respect those who saw the world through a different cultural lens. I visited prison wardens, assistants to emirs, and foreigners with custody of American children.

I can’t go back to those days again. By the end of my second tour in Saudi Arabia in the early 2000’s, I had to live by new restrictions on travel. We learned to be alert to the possibilities of terrorism, and not only in the Middle East. From the U.S. consulate in Dhahran, we watched on television as the twin towers fell on September 11, 2001.

Fortunately, I can conjure in novels the lessons I gained during the earlier days. The novels dredge up insights, before so much fire and fury, that I am only beginning to understand.

Why Do We Save Reminders of Past Events?

In cleaning out some shelves the other day, I found a copy of Newsweek, December 2, 1963. The issue was dedicated to articles about John F. Kennedy’s assassination the previous November.

Next I found a relative’s high school annual, published in 1918, the last year of World War I. The annual was dedicated to the first of the high school’s alumni to die in that war, on September 15, 1917, in France. His picture stares hopefully from the dedication page.

In my own files, I’ve saved clippings about the terrorism attacks of September 11, 2001. What might they mean to later generations? How close will they come to knowing the horror I felt as I watched the buildings fall?

How do we pass down our meaningful experiences? How do we help those who come after us to know, if only for an instant, what we feel now? For what reason? To learn from them? To ponder the results of our choices, wise and unwise?

We engage with our current communities. We also are a part of past communities. We make decisions that impact future communities. If we live only in the present, we may be swayed by current emotions to forget the lessons of the past. Studying the past, we may decide more wisely for the future.

“They who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”

December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001

Pearl Harbor AttackDecember 7, my calendar notes, is Pearl Harbor Day. The day commemorates lives lost in the attack on the U.S. naval base in Hawaii by Japanese forces in 1941. It led immediately to our entry into World II.

I understand the clutch in the gut Americans felt when they turned on their radios early on that Sunday morning. I felt the same when I walked into a room at the U.S. consulate in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, on September 11, 2001, and saw the television tuned to CNN. In living color, we watched over and over the replays of the attacks on New York and other places “out of a clear blue sky.”

Attack on the Twin TowersIn an article in the Foreign Service Journal (January, 2012), Margaret Sullivan recounted her early years in China as the daughter of an American missionary teacher when Japanese forces took over China. Ms. Sullivan remembers a Japanese soldier smiling at her family as they went through a checkpoint.

Now, she said, she has trouble accepting the wartime evaluation of Japanese people.

We tend to demonize any who are related to those who harm our country. We have difficulty seeing “the enemy” as individuals, some choosing to do harm, others simply caught up in an evil they did not condone.

Ms. Sullivan wrote: “I still grapple with the critical distinction between abhorring evil acts and casually lumping together all of a particular group of people as embodying that evil. And I am profoundly troubled for my own country when some among us incite hatred against the spectrum of other individuals and their widely differing communities and beliefs, as a single ‘bad guy’ entity.”