Schaff: A fateful mix — tragedy, fear and political opportunists

Here’s the best 9/11 lesson out there: If it happens again, don’t let fear betray… Here’s the best 9/11 lesson out there: If it happens again, don’t let fear betray you.

Anyone watching the lead-up to Sunday’s 9/11 anniversary witnessed an army of media personnel scrambling to squeeze meaning out of that senseless day when nearly 3,000 people lost their lives. In TV specials and editorials, lessons of various forms were offered and “never forget” messages were tossed about. Even The Pitt News editorial page joined the chorus, encouraging us last week to somehow “protract the disaster’s significance.”

These appeals have an audience for a reason. When faced with realities that shake our foundations — for example, if frequently taken-for-granted staples like basic security are questioned — we naturally welcome any opportunity to muffle unresolved internal dissonance to soothe  our uneasiness. Mass media “lesson plans” that condense 9/11’s nuances into one neat package of meaning provide that closure opportunity.

But before too many Pitt students make their final judgments, and before 9/11 indeed risks being forgotten, I have to stick a foot in the door, at least for my generation’s sake. I must join the ranks of these journalistic pedagogues because, in my view, most media outlets have largely missed 9/11’s most valuable lesson: Fear, not terrorists, can be a country’s greatest enemy.

At its heart, the country’s fear response to 9/11 consisted of flag-rallying and an overwhelmingly uncritical attitude of its president. All this made for a U.S. population unacceptably vulnerable to exploitation, and that’s just what happened. Unbridled fear allowed the Bush administration to use 9/11 for political gain on multiple levels, exact enormous costs on the rest of us and get away with it in the end.  Just as we should treat a large-scale attack on U.S. soil, nothing of this sort should ever be allowed to happen again.

You can probably guess I’m talking mostly about Iraq. After nearly a decade of Middle Eastern wars, the picture  is clear: Invading Iraq was a Bush agenda item long before the towers fell. When political opportunity struck, the Bush administration bent the truth — and intelligence officials’ arms — to connect Saddam Hussein with 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction. And then, most significantly, the public went along with the puppet show.

It wasn’t like 9/11 suddenly convinced the Bushies that Saddam’s government in particular was somehow special among other repressive regimes and demanded ousting by U.S. forces. Instead, the war was already coming through the pipeline. Surely, politicians on both sides looked upon the Fertile Crescent with a special longing after George H.W. Bush decided in 1991 not to make the Gulf War about more than Kuwait, even when an all-out invasion of Iraq could have commanded popular support. But a 1996 policy paper and statements from Paul O’Neill, the man who would become Bush 43’s first Treasury secretary, make the pre-preemption much clearer. The paper, written before al-Qaida was a household name, advocated an aggressive first-strike policy against Saddam Hussein as a means of securing a safer Middle East. The committee that composed the document was headed by Richard Perle, a defense hawk who became — you guessed it — a close adviser to George W. Bush’s administration. Eight years later, after being fired for dissension, O’Neill removed all doubt: In 2004, he gave the Wall Street Journal documents detailing Bush’s pre-9/11 war planning, which emphasized oil companies eyeing Saddam’s nationalized oil fields.

Once 9/11 came along, the Bush people found their chance, and the great American intelligence bake-a-thon began. Many publicized internal reports confirmed these power abuses years ago: The administration pressured intelligence professionals from multiple agencies into producing like-minded reports, cherrypicked those politically consistent reports for public display and then brutally punished dissenters (need I mention the ousting of former CIA operative Valerie Plame?). The result was a public masterfully manipulated by fear — if you’re a citizen with criticisms, well, don’t you know there’s a war going on? — and a costly war of false preemption.

After all, Iraq posed no real threats. No relevant ties to al-Qaida nor WMDs (I don’t count mustard gas) were ever found. Rather, what we found in Iraq was a vast desert on which to dump billions of public dollars, sacrifice 4,442 armed service members and stage an international relations catastrophe. Reputable economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes  predict that the final dollar cost of Iraq to run on the order of $3 trillion  — that’s not just counting combat expenses, but also the cost of treating wounded service members. And then there are the more incalculable costs: the thousands of dead Americans, the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and the 16 veterans committing suicide per day in recent years, according to Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki. Mission accomplished?

It should be noted that the 9/11 fear response was manipulated for more than just war-mongering. Bush invoked the tragedy to push through his second deficit-inflating tax cut in 2002, to threaten Alaskan wilderness with his ANWR drilling plan that same year, and to justify an explosion of government surveillance powers (see the Patriot Act) that impinge on law-abiding Americans’ civil liberties to this day.

Anti-Bush diatribes entered the realm of editorial cliche years ago. And even if my 9/11 lesson’s purpose were to bash Bush, I’d accomplish nothing, since The Pitt News’ readers are likely to toe a liberal line anyway. Instead, my generation would benefit most if we remembered the likes of Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove not for their cynicism or their mendacity, but for the disquieting fact that our country facilitated their exploitation scheme.

You might say I’m blaming the victim, and you’d have a point. The Bush administration pursued its anti-populist agenda with focus, ferocity and marketing genius; it’s hard to argue that masses of unassuming Americans, drunk on their own fear, could resist being taken advantage of. But if people my age don’t learn 9/11’s legacy of fear, are we to leave ourselves powerless for the next exploiter-in-chief? Let’s do better.

Contact Matt at matthew.schaff@gmail.com