As those who know me will gladly tell you, I have no shortage of annoying personality traits. One of my worst is an almost pathological need to be an iconoclast. Yes, I'm that guy who raves about a particular band... until they have a hit single. So naturally, last week while the rest of the nation was talking/writing/thinking about the anniversary of September 11, I wasn't.
Part of it was my natural aversion to doing what everyone else is doing, but part of it was also the distasteful nature of so much of what I was seeing out there: those who politicize such a tragedy are bad enough, but even those who don't remind me of how much we've lost, both on that infamous day and during the five years since.
Then I came across a video making the rounds online; home video footage of the World Trade Center shot on September 11 from a 35th floor apartment window only a few blocks away. My work computer doesn't have sound, but even the silent visuals were incredibly moving. I don't need to describe the many emotions this footage inspires. We all know, all too well.
Criticism of the war in Iraq is often met by our friends on the right with an accusation that we've forgotten the 3,000+ lives lost on September 11. As I sat, watching the towers crumble into a massive cloud of dust, wondering what it must have been like to watch it all from your living room window rather than on tv, the idea of forgetting seemed ludicrous. How could we ever forget.
But, unlike our friends on the right, my reaction wasn't anger at Iraq. It was anger at the people who did it, and anger that these people are still out there planning God knows what. I'm not normally an eye-for-an-eye type, but in this case, yeah, I could live with some Old Testament vengeance.
But, alas, we lose all the way around. We don't get the satisfaction of revenge. We don't get the security of knowing those responsible are no longer a threat. We don't get a tidy ending which would allow us to move on. What do we get? An expensive, ill-conceived and ill-managed war on a country that had nothing to do with any of this, a war that has depleted the ranks of our allies (in both senses), cost us hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of American lives. It has also cost us precious time. Five years have gone by and we have nothing to show for it except the much-touted fresh coats of paint on some Iraqi schools.
As elections loom larger, and President Bush's popularity remains low, it's more and more common (though not common enough) to see our friends on the right breaking ranks. Republican candidates are trumpeting their independent values in order to put some distance between themselves and this botched war. Well, that's simply not good enough. I want accountability. Not in the eye-for-an-eye sense of punishing them for being wrong (though that is tempting) but more along the lines of "what has changed to prevent something like this from ever happening again?"
Well? What has changed?