Well, obviously some things have changed and some have not. But of greater concern is the fork in the road that 9/11 presented to us back in 2001.  That day and its horrific events represented a monumental crossroads, and the United States had two major paths from which to choose.  And while each road provided its own internal range of options, each also essentially closed out many opportunities that would have been available along the other route.   As we will see, I believe we took the wrong road, and we can only hope that the path we are on can be turned back towards the proper one and merged with it.  I don't want to kill the fork-in-the-road metaphor here with overuse, helpful as it might be.  But keep it in mind as we discuss 9/11.

Before we look at the two directions presented by the 9/11 crossroads, let's quickly recall what actually happened that day.  A bunch of Islamic extremists, almost all Saudis, enacted their carefully planned scheme to hijack commercial airliners and crash them into various symbols of US power.  By any measure, their plan was amazingly successful, considering its audacious simplicity.  The reaction across America was absolute shock, followed by rage, sorrow, despair, depression, and a cascade of patriotism.  But one key distinction here is paramount to understanding the events that followed the attacks.  While it is safe to say that virtually everyone was surprised by what happened (planes used as missiles), not everyone in America was surprised that it happened.  For those familiar with the United States' long history of foreign meddling and the subsequent rage generated in the affected populations, it was not a huge shock that terrorist violence finally erupted on our home soil.  After all, you can only assassinate so many leaders, rig so many foreign elections, and finance so many covert coups before it comes back to bite you.  And indeed, bin Laden's stated reasons for the 9/11 attack included the specific grievances of US support of the corrupt Saudi regime, the continual US siding with Israel against the rights of the Palestinians, and the highly offensive presence of US military bases in the Islamic homeland of Saudi Arabia. We'll deal with the merit of these claims in a bit, but that's not the main point right now.  For the moment, we're just highlighting that some people (myself included) were not overtly surprised by the 9/11 attacks themselves, albeit the unexpected nature of the exact tactics.  

For those who were truly shocked by the WHY as well as the HOW of 9/11, the main question emerged as, "why do they hate us?"  We all remember the early onslaught of this WHY issue, in the many newspaper and magazine pieces that came out after the attack.  Who were these attackers?  What do they believe?  What is radical Islam? What's been going on in the Middle East all these years?  It is in the answers to this "why do they hate us?" question that we find the beginnings of the two divergent paths for America.

In the initial flurry of post-9/11 reporting, there were actually encouraging signs that we might have been ready, as a nation, to ask some tough questions and to be ready for some uncomfortable answers.  There were major pieces about Islamic extremism, the history of American foreign policy in the Middle East, and the complex relation of terrorist tactics and the enabling societies behind them.  There were even early attempts to emphasize that radical Islam and terrorism were very small fringe elements of a much larger, more moderate Muslim world.  I was briefly encouraged by these early forays into substantive reporting.  If that trend had continued, what path could we have followed?

Well, first of all, we would have had to face up to a hard truth: many people around the world hate the United States for the actions of our government.  General anti-US rage that bubbles up into terrorism is not caused by jealousy, or hatred of our freedoms.  Downtrodden and poor people have enough to worry about in their own lives and communities without being obsessed with how much crotch Britney Spears is showing when she gets out of her limo.  But people do get angry when the CIA overthrows their elected leader, just because he is not pro-business enough.  They do get upset when corrupt dictators are propped up with US dollars and weapons, in coincidentally oil-rich countries.  People get pissed about what our government does in our name, not because of what we are as regular American citizens.  And let's be clear here.  Administrations and Congresses from both sides of the aisle are implicated.  Both Democrats and Republicans have been sponsoring this meddling imperial crap for decades (for a good quick list of American foreign interventions, both legal and illegal, see Gore Vidal's Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace). 

The key here is not just the explicit complaints of terrorists.  Obviously, the assertions of extremists are going to be excessive and deeply skewed.  But the grievances of terrorists represent the tip of a much larger and less extreme form of popular anti-Americanism.  Bin Laden's rantings capture some the essence of general Muslim sentiment around the world. Even if the specifics of some particular terrorist complaints are wildly off-base, I think the evidence is conclusive that general Muslim displeasure with US foreign policy is well-founded.  The Islamic extremists are able to capitalize on this general discontent to find shelter and financial support for their crimes.

So if we had taken one path after 9/11, we would have been honest about our government's misdeeds and made strides to address the general discontent in the Muslim world regarding US foreign policies.  This is not giving in to terrorists demands, but rather understanding the nature of terrorism itself.  Terrorism is not a defined entity, and a terrorist is not a specific type of person, like a Canadian or a music-lover.  Rather, terrorism is a tactic of the powerless, a violence that bubbles to the surface from a much larger reservoir of subdued grievance.  Like pinching off the heads of dandelions, going after terrorists is useless unless something is done about the underground root that gives them nourishment. So how do you get at the roots of terrorism?  How do we dry up the reservoir of Muslim ill will?  Well, as we've seen, indiscriminate wars that result in slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians and the destruction of vital infrastructure are not the way.  Since it has been our government policies that generate the ill will, our policies have to spearhead the undoing of the damage.  We have to pledge to not interfere with countries' internal politics.  We have to not prop up corrupt dictators.  We have to commit to brokering a fair resolution to the Israel-Palestine situation, promising to not give up until the deal is done.  Then, and only then, we can sponsor cooperative international intelligence and police operations to root out real terrorist networks, while also committing ourselves to international efforts at easing poverty, building basic infrastructure, and sharing technology with developing nations.  But if we do not first demand that our government change its policy direction, then other international efforts will fall flat, and we will not build up any kind of international trust.

Again, we shouldn't do these things to appease terrorists.  We should do them because they are honest, effective, and a hell of lot cheaper than going to war.  Diplomacy costs a lot less than dropping bombs and sending troops halfway around the world.  Participation in international development bodies and organizations spreads the financial load among many nations, and is a lot cheaper than trying to nation-build at the point of a gun.  And as mentioned earlier, killing a few thousand terrorists will not do us any good if our actions inflame general anti-American sentiment among billions of Muslims around the globe.  We have to get out of the mindset that admitting our government's misdeeds amounts to "blaming America."  This is not about "America" per se, this is about our government and its failed policies.  The government is not America.  I am American, you are America.  The government is just a temporary body that works for us; and when they betray our trust, we have to have the balls to call them out, admit our responsibility for their mistakes, and demand changes.

Of course, all of the above laid along the road not taken.  What did we do instead?  Not surprisingly, we took the easy way out.  We channeled our rage into the nonsensical rubric of the War on Terror.  We decided that specific heads needed to roll, instead of fixing the true source of the problem.  So we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, spending trillions, killing hundreds of thousands, and ruining those two countries.  And we're now locked into decades of future spending on the cleanup.  The average American knows no more about "Why They Hate Us" than he did on Sep. 10th, 2001.  The world's opinion of the US is now devastatingly low, especially among Muslims.  And the economy is now in total meltdown because we have squandered our attention and treasure in the sands of Mesopotamia.  

Can we "win" this War on Terror, or Islamofascism, as McCain likes to call it?  Of course not, because you can't defeat a tactic, especially when the exact things you are doing are creating more of the ill will that spawned the terrorist acts in the first place.  And even if we were to pacify Iraq and Afghanistan, how many more decades and trillions would it take to create stable, safe, prosperous countries that are a force for peace in the region?  We can't even keep our own citizens employed and in their homes, and we're going to be able to create democratic Shangri-Las in the Middle East?  Ridiculous!

In a limitless world where cost is no object, we could afford to be the world's Arsonist-Firemen, the guys who go in and smash things up ($ for defense contractors), and then pay to rebuild it all (more $ for other government contractors).  And we would be able to treat every complex situation with the moral clarity that comes with declaring war.  We could lavish trillions to defeat the latest global spectre-du-jour. And we could nation-build to our heart's content, creating a new American economy built on a wide-spectrum military intervention and occupation "services."  But in reality, oil-based civilization is winding down (the US military is the largest single consumer of cheap oil, don't forget), and the world as we know it is about to get a lot smaller.  In this emerging reality, we will not be able to pursue nebulous victories around the globe, no matter how worthy we think the cause.  The truth will become perhaps the most valuable commodity during the Long Emergency, the kind of truth we didn't tell after 9/11.