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. Every president from Bush on 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 halfway around the globe. And the United States continues to have
close ties with Israel and share in the launching of the war on Iran in February
2026.
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. And now ICE targets political opponents, immigrants, and others for kidnapping or murder.
In addition, 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. As the
Cost of War summarized recently:
https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/paper/overview-true-costs-post-911-wars
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 much 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.
