With bumbling federal response, terrorist attack achieved objectives

By David McElroy · September 11, 2011

Despite being the biggest economic and military superpower of the world, the United States was defeated 10 years ago today by a bunch of guys with box cutters and a simple plan.

It didn’t have to be that way. As bad as the attacks 10 years ago were, the real defeat has come in the U.S. response over the years. The initial losses were devastating, but they were nothing compared to the self-inflicted wounds that came from politicians using the attacks as an excuse to take more power for themselves — and scared Americans have allowed it to happen with little complaint.

Everybody in the world is doing a retrospective on the anniversary today, so I’m going to try not to belabor the same things everybody else is already saying. But I do want to make five points.

First, the ultimate blame for the attacks 10 years ago today rests solely with the people who planned it, enabled it and carried it out. They have ultimate responsibility for having murdered thousands of innocent people that day. As we look to the historical causes and to the bumbling response of the U.S. government, it’s important to remember that those men consciously chose to do something very evil. It’s also important to remember the many thousands of people who died — people who never asked to be caught up in a political dispute that they didn’t create.

Second, the entire confrontation with the Arab world and Muslim world has its roots in U.S. government meddling around the world for most of the last century. The U.S. government treated the people and countries of the Middle East as pawns to achieve various other goals. If the United States hadn’t spent so much time setting up and supporting various dictators and trying to make decisions about land and people that wasn’t ours to make decisions about, the people there wouldn’t have learned to hate us. George W. Bush used to claim “they hate us for our freedom.” That’s a lie. The ones who hate us hate us because the U.S. government has interfered with the affairs of those countries — and the government has done it in our names.

Third, Americans are demonstrably less free today than we were 10 years ago this morning. It’s easier for our masters to wiretap us, demand private information about us without warrants and to monitor what we’re doing in our financial transactions. We have police who think it’s a crime to take photos of public buildings from public property — and police officials who think it’s a reasonable policy to violate the rights of peaceful Americans just for taking pictures. We are subjected to treatment at airports that we wouldn’t have put up with 10 years ago. Even with all of this, a determined and decently financed group could easily still pull off a credible attack that would terrify everyone.

Fourth, we continue to make enemies. Anyone who thinks that toppling governments in Iraq and Afghanistan has made us safer is delusional. We are killing innocent people in those countries. A whole new generation of potential terrorists has learned to hate Americans because of what the U.S. government has done in those countries. The wars have cost us massive amounts of money and made us no safer than before. New enemies will pop up when and where we least expect them — because we are determined to create new enemies.

Fifth, whatever moral authority the United States had 10 years ago today — as the victim of a vicious attack — has been slowly destroyed by how the U.S. government has treated many, many people who it simply didn’t know what to do with. Random people who were scooped up in Afghanistan and Pakistan by various authorities ended up at Guantanamo. Many of these were people who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the U.S. government didn’t want to admit it had made mistakes. Our government tortured innocent people. Some of those innocent people have returned to their countries — to tell their friends and families that the Americans truly are monsters. And I don’t blame them.

Most of us probably remember watching the news of the attacks 10 years ago this morning and wondering what it was going to mean for us. I remember comparing it to Pearl Harbor, thinking that it would change everything about the political and world landscape for five years or so. I never dreamed that we would still be embroiled in unwinnable conflicts 10 years later. I also never dreamed that politicians would use the attacks as such an opportunity to spend obscene amounts of money and grab even more power.

I’m not optimistic about what the future holds for U.S. relations with much of the Middle East and with many Muslim people around the world. The people who attacked this country 10 years ago today wanted to bring about a long-term war between their world and ours. Because of the bumbling, unwise and ignorant response of the U.S. government over the decade, they’re getting their wish.

In the most realistic sense, those dead terrorists have won. They’ve been able to reach out from the grave to keep achieving their goals, but only because the U.S. government has played the part they wanted it to play. It continues to make all of us vulnerable for the future.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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