Harry Targ
9/11 in Chile
On the bright and sunny morning of September 11, 1973, aircraft bombed targets in Valparaiso, Chile, and moved on to the capital, Santiago. Following a well-orchestrated plan, tanks rolled into the capital city, occupied the central square, and fired on the Presidential palace. Inside that building, President Salvador Allende broadcast a final address to his people and fatally shot himself as soldiers entered his quarters.
Thousands of Allende supporters were rounded up and held in the city’s soccer stadium and many, including renowned folk singer Victor Jara, were tortured and killed. For the next fifteen years, Chilean workers were stripped of their right to form unions, political parties and elections were eliminated, and the junta led by General Augusto Pinochet ruled with an iron fist all but ignored outside the country until Chileans began to mobilize to protest his scheme to become President for life.
9/11 in the United States
Of course, 9/11/01 was different. The United States was attacked by foreign terrorists, approximately 3,000 citizens and residents were killed at the World Trade Center in New York, over a rural area in Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon. People all over the world expressed their sorrow and sympathy for the victims of the 9/11 attacks as the American people experienced shock and dismay.
But then everything began to change. Within days of the terrorist attacks, members of President Bush’s cabinet began to advocate a military assault on Iraq, a longstanding target of the Washington militarists of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Now is the time, they said, to take out Saddam Hussein, seize control of Iraqi oil fields, and reestablish United States control over the largest share of the oil fields of the Persian Gulf region. Cooler heads prevailed for a time, however. We cannot attack Iraq, critics said, because Iraq had nothing to do with the crimes in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington.
So it was decided that a war would be waged on Afghanistan, because the headquarters of the shadowy organization Al Qaeda, led by Osama Bin Laden, was said to be in that country (even though the Taliban government had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack). On October 6, 2001, that war was initiated and continued until August, 2021 (even though Bin Laden was killed in May, 2011).
Shortly after launching the war on Afghanistan, the neo-cons in the Bush administration began a campaign to convince the American people that we needed to make war on Iraq. Lies were articulated that the Iraqi dictator was really behind the global terrorists who perpetrated 9/11. He had weapons of mass destruction. He was part of a global Islamic fundamentalist cabal. At last, despite evidence to the contrary, the mobilization of millions of Americans against war, growing global resentment against the Bush Doctrine justifying preemptive wars, the United States attacked Iraq in March, 2003. That war too continued for years.
Over the last two decades, U.S. military budgets tripled, thousands of U.S. soldiers died or sustained irreparable injuries, and an estimated one million Afghan and Iraqi people, mostly civilians, died. Meanwhile the United States maintained over 700 military installations around the world, declared the great land and sea area around the globe at the equator the “arc of instability,” and engaged in direct violence or encouraged others to do so, from Colombia to Honduras in the Western Hemisphere, to Ethiopia and Somalia in the Horn of Africa, to Israel, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria and Libya in the Middle East and Persian Gulf, to Pakistan, and Afghanistan in East Asia. Presidents Bush and Obama declared that United States military overreach to be in the national interest of the country and to serve the humanitarian interest of the world. In recent years U.S. military programs have included the use of computer operated aircraft, drones, that can target and kill anywhere based on decisions from command headquarters half way around the globe.
Meanwhile at home, the Patriot Act extended the prerogatives of the government to launch a program claiming to be essential to protect the people from domestic terrorists: spying on Americans; incarcerating people from virtually anywhere deemed to be a security threat; and establishing a political climate that intimidates critics of United States foreign policy.
Domestically, the decade since 9/11 was characterized by sustained assaults on the basic living standards of the bottom 90 percent of the population in terms of wealth and income. Unemployment rose dramatically. Job growth ground to a halt. Health care benefits declined while costs skyrocketed. Virtually every public institution in America, except the military, was threatened by budget cuts: education, libraries, public health facilities, highways and bridges, fire and police protection, environmental quality. And over the two decades of war and military spending, these domestic problems have persisted, and with the pandemic people have been made more vulnerable.
Support for war overseas and at home during the last twenty years has been stoked by a so-called “war on terrorism” and an anti-government ideology, made popular earlier by the Reagan administration, that lionizes Adam Smith’s claims that only the market can satisfy human needs. Following 9/11, the “beast,” government, except for the military has been starved. Only in recent years, has a call for a Green New Deal and the argument that government must serve the people begun to reverse the ideology that was institutionalized after 9/11.
However, not all have had to sacrifice during this twenty-year “war on terror. The rich have gotten richer while the income and wealth of 90 percent of the population have experienced economic stagnation or decline. Media monopolization has facilitated the rise of a strata of pundits who simplify and distort the meaning of events since 9/11 by claiming that war is necessary; the terrorist threat is a growing global threat; as a nation and individually we need to arm ourselves; and subliminally it is people of color who constitute the threat to security and well-being. And, of course, military contractors have been the main beneficiaries of war and planning for war.
Where Do We Go From Here
So the United States 9/11 event was not the first. The Chilean 9/11 preceded the U.S. one by 28 years. Its people experienced a brutal military coup. And in the United States mass murder was committed by 19 terrorists. But in both cases the 9/11 event was followed by violence, threats to democracy, and economic shifts from the vast majority of the population to the wealthy and political/military elites. In both cases, draconian economic policies and constraints on civil and political rights were defined as required by threats to the “homeland.”
As the anniversary of the U.S. 9/11 is remembered, it is critical to reflect upon how the murder of 3,000 citizens and residents was defined as an opening salvo in a perpetual “war on terrorism:” how this war trumped traditional civil liberties afforded by the constitution; and how this war, it was said, must be waged at whatever cost to the lives and economic resources of the country. And, as with the Cold War, military spending took priority over every other activity for which the government had a role. 9/11/73 caused the Chilean people pain and suffering that they are still working to overcome. Unless the American people mobilize to challenge the policies, foreign and domestic, that were justified by the tragedy of 9/11, the United States will continue to move down a similar path the Chilean people traveled after their 9/11.
Postscript 2021
Reminiscing about the immediate aftermath of 9/11,
President Bush’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mitch Daniels
said in a recent interview: “OMB got
some significant assignments, of course first of all to organize all the
emergency funding for the military action which cleaned the Taliban out of
Afghanistan, for the rebuilding of New York City, the compensation of the
victims.” https://www.wibc.com/news/local-indiana/daniels-remembers-9-11-and-assignments-for-the-bush-white-house/
As many have noted, of
course, the Taliban had nothing to do with the 9/11 terrorist acts, “cleaning
out the Taliban” is an ugly way to refer to a people, and, of course, the
Taliban have taken back control of the government of Afghanistan after twenty
years of massive bloodshed and war. And while the people of Afghanistan may or
may not approve of the return of the Taliban to power, they definitely want the
United States to leave their war-torn country.
And back at home, in the
aftermath of 9/11, the United States has expanded its war-making capacities at
enormous costs to the American people—health care, overcoming climate change,
reducing economic inequality, and responding to pandemics.
And Purdue University,
where Mitch Daniels is currently President, a new program of research and
development of weaponry to prepare for the next war is being developed. The
Purdue Research Foundation in July announced the creation of a Purdue Aerospace
District where university researchers, in collaboration with military
contractors such as Rolls-Royce, will be developing a huge facility for
research and development of hypersonic weapons to respond to future Chinese and
Russian threats. Hypersonic weapons will “travel so fast they could cover
hundreds of miles in minutes, leaving virtually no time to either intercept
them or take cover.” (Sam Stall, “Purdue’s Aerospace District hyper about
hypersonics,” Indianapolis Business Journal, September 3, 2021.
https://www.ibj.com/articles/hyper-about-hypersonic
In the classic song
“Where Have All The Flower Gone?” Pete Seeger asks “Oh When Will They Ever
Learn?”
