Harry Targ
A revised repost from September 1, 2011
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, 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. But 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. On October 6, 2001, that war was initiated and still goes, not militarily (US troops were withdrawn in 2022) but with brutal economic sanctions, although Bin Laden had been killed in 2011 during the Obama administration.
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 ended in 2011.
During the decade following 9/11 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, and still does, over 700 military installations around the world, and in the Bush period declared the great land and sea area around the globe at the equator the “arc of instability.”
During the Bush and Obama administrations the United
States 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 interests of the world. The U.S. adopted
programs that 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.
At home, as a result of the 9/11 attack the Patriot Act extended the
prerogatives of government to launch programs 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.
During the Trump Administration, the president’s grassroots supporters and the
Republican Party in general shifted to the right, perhaps in the “spirit of
9/11,” what many regard as raising the threat of fascism.
Domestically, since 9/11 basic living standards of the bottom 90 percent of the
population in terms of wealth and income have worsened. Unemployment, before
the Covid crisis, rose dramatically. Health care benefits have declined while
costs skyrocket. Virtually every public institution in America, except the
military, is being threatened by budget cuts: education, libraries, public
health facilities, highways and bridges, fire and police protection,
environmental quality.
Support for war overseas and at home stoked by a so-called “war on terrorism”
and various crises such as the Ukrainian War today, coupled with an
anti-government ideology made popular earlier by the Reagan administration, lionize a “New Cold War” against Russia and
China.
Not all had to sacrifice during this ten-year “war on terror” and its attendant
domestic programs. 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 was
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.
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 most of the population to the wealthy and political/military
elites. In both cases, draconian economic policies and constraints of 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; how this war, it was said, must be
waged at whatever cost to the lives and economic resources of the country. As
with the Cold War, military spending takes priority over every other activity
for which the government has a role. 9/11/73 caused the Chilean people pain and
suffering that they are still working to overcome years later as they struggle
to reverse the Pinochet constitution. Unless the American people mobilize to
challenge the policies, foreign and domestic, that were justified by such
occurrences as the tragedy of 9/11, the United States will continue to move
down a similar path the Chilean people traveled after their 9/11.
And Today?
Endless money fuels endless war, often at the expense of human needs at home and abroad. Congress had no problem setting the stage for at least $7.5 trillion of Pentagon spending over the next decade, but it failed to endorse even $1.5 trillion for a transformative 10-year package to invest in children and caregiving, combat climate change, expand affordable health care, and strengthen the middle class.(Friends Committee on National Legislation https://www.fcnl.org/issues/us-wars-militarism/pentagon-spending )
Now is a good time for peace activists to expand
education about the history of unchallenged military spending, continued
military basing all across the globe, the use of high technology and mobile
troop formations to intervene everywhere, the consequences of military spending
for making the world a more dangerous place, and the costs, not only in lives
overseas but to a basic standard of living at home.
