As this week's commemorations of the attacks that took place
on Sept. 11, 2001 continue, it is appropriate that the country
pause to remember those who were lost and injured in the attacks and our
response to them as well as those who distinguished themselves seeking to
protect America and the values we hold dear.
The wounds of that day and the scars they have left on our
society are such that they are certain to be felt by most of us who were alive
that day for the rest of our lives.
That said, it does not diminish -- indeed, it enhances --
those moments of remembrance if we take the time to acknowledge and consider
those who have been the innocent victims of America's grotesque, unjustifiable
overreaction to those attacks.
The numbers vary, but it is certain that well over 100,000
and perhaps as many as a million innocent Iraqis, Afghans, and Pakistanis have
been killed as a result of America's efforts to seek revenge for our
losses. That means, even the lowest
estimates of collateral damage associated with our invasion of Iraq alone from
groups like the Associated Press, the Iraq Family Health Survey, or the Iraq Body
Count Project, suggest that between 30 and 50 times as many Iraqis died as a
result of our invasion as died in 9/11 attacks -- which, of course, had no
relationship whatsoever to the country in which they lived. Higher estimates, like those of the Lancet or
the Opinion Research Business Survey, suggest totals 200 to 300 times higher. In Afghanistan too, civilians paid for our
military intervention with their lives in multiples of our 9/11 losses.
These losses too involved mothers, fathers, and their
children, bereavement and holes in the fabric of civilization that can never be
mended. To ignore them is to recommit
the crimes that led to both their deaths and those of the thousands who were
lost in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon or in that field in Pennsylvania;
it amounts once again to the valuing of the lives of those we know, those close
to us, at a premium to those who are physically or culturally distant from us.
What happened that clear blue morning in early September a
decade ago here in the United States was a ghastly example of the cost not just of
misdirected fury but also of the disregard of the value of life, law and
morality. So too were the losses that
have come since.
To suggest that the tragedies of 9/11 took place exclusively
on that day or that the victims worth mourning were exclusively Americans or
our friends and allies is to misunderstand the nature not just of those
tragedies but of tragedy in general. If
we wish to mark those losses closest to us in a way that will reduce the
likelihood of future such catastrophes or better, that will increase the
likelihood of human progress away from such needless bloodletting, then we ought
to spend time reflecting on the fate of those foreign, faceless others who died
in the conflagrations that were ignited that day as well as on our own individual
roles, however small, in promoting, rationalizing or ignoring America's own
crimes.
For the past ten years, our most visible commemoration of 9/11
has been the ways we sought vengeance, visiting death upon innocents purely
based upon the pretext that our own suffering had been great. While we are pulling away and even
repudiating the policies that were linked to our own misdeeds we should try to
remember that calling one thing a policy and another a terrorist plot is an
insufficient distinction to the dead.
A great tragedy took place on 9/11. It was compounded many
times over in the decade since. Acknowledge both facts or invite the accusation that we have learned
little or that we are no better than the enemies we condemn.
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