Yesterday, we commemorated the tragic events of September 11, 2001. Tearful observances were held at Ground Zero in New York, at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 07: A worker looks up at beams of the Tribute in Lights ahead of the tenth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on September 7, 2011 in New York City. The Tribute in Light is comprised of 88 7000 watt searchlights that beam into the sky near the site of the World Trade Center in remembrance of the September 11 attacks. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)
The solemn occasion, however, did not deter GOP from its calculated
campaign to persuade the American electorate that President Obama is not
to be trusted.
On Monday, a right-wing funded think tank,
the Government Accountability Institute, issued a report that contended
that President Obama attends fewer than half of his daily intelligence
briefings. Former Vice President Dick Cheney cited the report to
criticize the President."If President Obama were participating in his
intelligence briefings on a regular basis then perhaps he would
understand why people are so offended at his efforts to take sole credit
for the killing of Osama bin Laden," Cheney said in a statement to the
Daily Caller. "Those who deserve the credit are the men and women in our
military and intelligence communities who worked for many years to
track him down. They are the ones who deserve the thanks of a grateful
nation."
On "Fox and Friends," Senator John McCain asserted,
contrary to all of the existing evidence that, "As far as the Middle
East is concerned, this president's national security policy has been an
abysmal failure."
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani
used the remembrance to find fault with President Obama's unwillingness
to join with Bibi Netanyahu and his Likud Party in a jihad against
Iran's nuclear program."They are the biggest state sponsor of terrorism
in the world. If they have nuclear weapons, the next time there is an
attack it could be with nuclear weapons," he said on the same show.
"There has to be a sense of urgency about stopping them instead of this
almost irrational desire to negotiate with them. They have to be afraid
of us if we're going to stop them. I'm not certain that's the case right
now."
By contrast, Kurt Eichenwald offered a sober riposte to the GOP's braggadocio. In an op ed column in the New York Times
yesterday, entitled "The Deafness Before The Storm," Eichenwald
reminded readers of the Bush administration's refusal to act in the
summer of 2001 upon the advice of the CIA, which issued a number of
warnings about an imminent terrorist attack. Eichenwald wrote, " But
some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An
intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told
me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently
assumed power in the Pentagon were warning that the C.I.A. had been
fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be
planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein,
whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat."
History
now records, in graphic detail, the consequences of that failure to set
aside their ideological blinkers and the refusal of the neo-cons to view
the world as it is. Because of their triumph over foreign policy, the
U.S. became involved in two wars that led to the deaths and injuries of
thousands of our soldiers, with an untold number of dead and the
pervasive misery suffered by hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians
in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here at home the costs to the U.S. tax-payers
from these ill-conceived wars, including the long-term care and
treatment of our wounded veterans, may ultimately exceed $6 trillion
dollars.
But what are there other lessons to be learned
from 9/11? One is to be very weary. The very same neo-cons who advised
the Bush Administration - including Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton -
have become top advisors to Mitt Romney. They, along with Cheney,
Giuliani and Romney - all of whom successfully evaded military serve
during the Vietnam War - now stridently beat the drums of war on behalf
of a tone-deaf, right-wing Israeli lobby that would involve this country
in another misbegotten war of foreign adventure that could potentially
explode the entire Middle East.
A second lesson to be learned
is that neither the GOP nor any other political group should ever be
permitted again to use fear as an instrument of national policy, as the
Bush administration so successfully did. Fear eclipses reason and, a
Franklin Roosevelt sagely noted, prevents us as a people from tackling
urgent problems with real-world solutions.
A
third and equally important lesson to be learned is that lies, slogans
and cant can never be relied upon as a substitute for a serious
discussion of policy differences. The GOP and its supporters continue to
insist that government is not a solution, and that the public sector
does not create jobs that provide important or meaningful services. Yet
125 of the people who died at the Pentagon on 9/11 were public
employees; 343 New York City Fire Department firefighters, 23 New York
City Police Department officers, 37 Port Authority Police Department
officers,15 EMTs and 3 court officers died responding to the attacks on
the Twin Towers. Another 2,000 first responders were also injured in the
attacks. They offered their lives heroically, without hesitation and
never insisted, aside from being paid a fair wage, that their lives were
indispensable or that, because of the vagaries of tax policy or a
failure to be paid extravagant bonuses,they were unwilling to sacrifice
their lives in an effort to help others.
The
events of 9/11 should serve as a stark and perpetual reminder of the
responsibility of the Bush administration and the GOP for this national
tragedy. Those who continue to enable them should also should also be
publicly repudiated for their continuing, irresponsible efforts to
distract voters from the need to focus upon the real problems that have
reduced millions of our fellow citizens to lives of penury in a Dawinian
war that GOP has unleashed against the rest of us on behalf of its
wealthy elite.
