September 11th, 2009 Posted by Michael Cohen

It's hard for to believe that it's been eight years since my mother woke me up with a panicked phone call on the morning of September 11th, 2001 to tell me that a plane had just flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. I had been sleeping in after a very long night and remember oh so vividly groggily  turning on the TV and seeing the incongruous sight of the Twin Towers belching out smoke and flames. While my life has taken many twists and turns since that day the events of that time still resonate with me very deeply - the haunting missing posters with pictures of happier moments that hung in subway stations, on building walls and lampposts, the acrid odor of burning jet fuel, which you could smell for weeks even months after and of course the social conversations that inevitably evolved into the one question that seemingly everyone wanted to answer - "where were you the morning of?"

But above all, my thoughts of September 11th always come back to my good friend Brock Safronoff, who along with thousands of others on that terrible morning lost his life. Five weeks before September 11th, I attended Brock's wedding in Staten Island. A week later I went to his funeral.  There is always a tendency to sanctify the deceased but it is not an exaggeration to say that Brock was a special person and one of the genuinely nicest people I've ever known. (I used to always joke with him that he had no business living in New York City; he was just too nice a guy). And like me he shared a debilitating addiction to Detroit sports teams that involved us spending many Sundays in our 20s drinking beer at a bar on the Upper East Side watching Lions football games - with George Plimpton no less! You can read more about Brock here and here.

While my thoughts of Brock are always tinged with sadness; they are equally tinged with anger - anger at the more than 4,000 American soldiers who have died avenging his death in Iraq, and angry that more Americans will die in Afghanistan chasing the phantom of al Qaeda.

One thing that occurred to me this morning when I was thinking about the significance of today is that al Qaeda, the organization that wreaked such havoc eight years ago is today a spent and hollow force. If you believe yesterday's article in the Guardian, the organization is down to a more 6-8 leaders and 200 core operatives; they are having a difficult time recruiting new members and their nihilistic ideology, which has seemingly killed more Muslims than Americans, is both discredited and dismissed throughout most of the Arab world. Since 9/11 they have not been able to launch a single major attack against the United States - there are only two major attacks associated with core al Qaeda (London and Madrid) and even there the connection is tenuous. In the end September 11th ended up being the end not the beginning of al Qaeda's war with America.

Except this is only partially true, because the United States instead of responding like a sober and mature great power played precisely into the rhetoric of al Qaeda and Bin Laden by invading and occupying an Arab country for more than 6 years and engaging in the sort of torture techniques that strike at the very heart of what America stands for as a nation. Our response to September 11th has been both disproportionate and counter-productive - indeed while al Qaeda is barely able to muster an attack against America we continue to chase them around the world in military adventures that have seemingly no end in sight and increasingly, only limited purpose. al Qaeda has lost the war and yet we continue to fight them at cost of both treasure and blood.

I can only note with extraordinary irony that today in Washington lawmakers are arguing about spending a trillion dollars to fix our health care system even though it is estimated that 18,000 Americans die every year because they lack health insurance. To put that in perspective, that's 144,000 people in the eight years since September 11th.

And yet the United States has spent well over a trillion dollars in both direct and indirect costs in fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because 3,000 Americans, including my friend Brock Safronoff, were killed on September 11th, 2001.  It makes what is already a sad day that much sadder to consider. But hopefully we, as a nation, can learn from the mistakes of the past eight years to make the next eight that much better and smarter.

Comments

[Jacob]

May I recomend: Hershman D Jablow and Lieb,J."A Brotherhood of Tyrants: Manic Depression and Absolute Power." 1994 Amherst Prometheus Books. Key insights: Manic depressive despots are often beyond reason, in such cases diplomacy a paradigm failure. They may have paranoid delusions, and delusions of infallability, invulnerability, and invincibility. They tend to be ruthless and indifferent to the suffering of others. They may use religion or ideology to attract followers in their personal quest for world domination.

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