9/11

I am often in awe of my wife, Sandy. She is the one person I know whose first reaction on 9/11 was to ask what could have shamed and enraged the men who flew the planes into the buildings such that they would be willing to spend their lives that way.

After we all shared the shock of seeing the planes hit the towers and beginning to realize how many were likely to be dead, my own next reaction was to wonder why everyone was so surprised. The people who are considered experts had been expecting a major terrorist attack on the U.S. for a long time. The U.S. is the dominant military and economic power in the world and it does many things, both officially and unofficially, that make it hated as well as loved. The U.S. has many policies, such as its willingness to prop up dictatorships that sell us oil, or ally with us in military issues, that are going to outrage people who are hurt by those policies. I still remember going to my first non-Embassy academic party in Rio de Janeiro as a very young American diplomat in 1976 and immediately encountering a man who took one look at me, spat out the word "Gringo," and headed for the door. Turns out he had been tortured by the military regime in Brazil that he held the U.S. largely responsible for (by supporting the coup that brought it into power). The hostess was clever enough to grab both of us, introduce us, and encourage him to tell me his story, which was an eye-opener.

So I had a hard time understanding the rather wide-eyed innocent outrage of most people who could not even begin to understand how anyone other than utter monsters could possibly strike directly at the U.S. and its people. I also think it is completely odious to kill thousands of innocent people by turning planes into bombs. But it doesn't get us anywhere to refuse to even try to understand why it happened. We can and should grieve for those lives. But personally I grieve for the bombers and their families, too.

I don't think it does us any good whatsoever to simply declare them to be incomprehensible enemies. I am all in favor of defending our own lives. But we do that best by being smart enough to try to figure out why those men did that and head it off much earlier at the source by trying to deal a bit more honestly with the problems that turned them into suicide bombers in the first place. Maybe we make ourselves feel better by saying things like "they hate our freedoms," but I don't think we accomplish much else.

Over the last 27 years and particularly over the last 7, the U.S. seems to be increasingly unable to see the world in any terms but military ones. It seems to have put virtually all its resources on to only one option for dealing with the world. It seems both sad and utterly typical that the U.S. military commander in Iraq returned to brief Congress today in a private jet full of aides and support while the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq flew back alone on a commercial jet. The U.S. has to be able to think of more effective and less expensive ways to deal with problems than sending in the military. Which means we have to put some of our resources into other things.

I spent eight years, early on (1975-1983), trying to help people abroad understand the U.S. better, as a diplomat and researcher for the U.S. It seemed then that the U.S. was sophisticated enough to put a fair bit of energy into trying to understand the world better and relate to it better. Quite a lot of that was just PR and spin, but quite a lot of money went into educating people in U.S. universities, doing people exchanges, sending cultural groups around, interacting with international media, opening libraries that were intellectual havens for many, and just plain talking to people. I have had literally dozens of conversations with people since who really enjoyed and appreciated the libraries the U.S. operated in many cities and the many scholarships it gave out. To my mind, and in the opinion of many people I have talked to in Asia, Europe and Latin America, those kinds of things helped make the world safer than the small fraction of one aircraft carrier that was the equivalent of their cost. The U.S. cut back many of those programs in the 1990s, because U.S. leaders somehow really did think all history and conflict were over and that we could enjoy a nice big peace dividend because the the USSR was gone. Many people knew then that many people in the Mideast and elsewhere were desperately unhappy with U.S. policies, but did not seem to take the threats seriously enough to reconsider the policies or even seriously try to communicate the reasons behind them.

It really saddens me to see polls by the Pew Trust and others which indicate that good opinion about the U.S. has gone down disastrously in most countries, including the U.S.' oldest friends in Europe, since 2003. The U.S. government decided to invade Iraq in the face of very heavy opposition from both leaders and public opinion in many countries. We as a country have since gotten weary of that war, but I am not sure we learned much about the need to take the opinion of our friends abroad into account when we decide our policies. I honestly don't get why many Americans continue to be literally scornful of the idea of taking advice from friends around the world. We could have saved a few trillion dollars to invest in sagging highway bridges, underfunded school systems, etc. if we had listened to a few more of our friends abroad about the dangers of invading Iraq.