Each September 11th since 2001, as another anniversary of a tragic assault upon this country’s life and treasure is observed, we relive those horrendous images and think in powerful unison about the almost three thousand lives lost that bright fall day. Some of us mourn loved ones. Some feel collective grief. The hearts of some still pound with a desire for revenge. Some wish the tragedy had provoked a deeper, more profound and useful national conversation about the roots of anti-American hatred and what it means to live in a multicultural world—where one country cannot forever play the bully role and still expect to be loved and respected.
On this twelfth anniversary we find ourselves in yet another isolationist situation, with our president and military urging us to approve a “surgical bombing attack” against Syria. The hawks don’t have the votes this time around, and Russia has made a suggestion that may possibly avoid immediate attack. Yet it seems likely the hawks will have their way eventually. The CIA already has people inside Syria, and US American democracy no longer has much to do with the will of the people.
Most of us don’t realize that September 11th commemorates another military attack, the one that in 1973 overthrew Chile’s democratically elected Popular Unity government. General Augusto Pinochet, the dictator who led that coup and remained in power for the next 17 years, was advised and funded by the United States. Our country was more than complicit in the takeover that tortured, disappeared and murdered not three thousand but tens of thousands of Chileans. The US had simply decided it couldn’t tolerate a socialist society within its radius of control. In the years since the Chilean tragedy US complicity has been amply documented.
This week Chile commemorates the fortieth anniversary of its 9/11. One of the few articles in the US corporate press to report on it was a small piece in a recent New York Times in which it was reported that the man who pulled the trigger on beloved singer/songwriter Victor Jara has been living for years a free man in Florida. Despite his criminal past, he easily became a US citizen. Now Jara’s widow is suing for extradition. She is not asking for money, only for admission of guilt.
United States governments have a long history of supporting repressive dictatorships. The Pinochet regime was only one of many. When it has been in our interest to do so, we have been silent or even co-conspirators. Yet when we have economic, military or geopolitical interests to defend, we mouth outrage at a sovereign state’s crimes against its citizens, providing us with the excuse we need to intervene. Government officials know the public has a short memory when it comes to the litany of times we have stood on the wrong side of history. Our media and educational system sees to that. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Vietnam are but three instances when we were the ones using weapons of mass destruction or chemical and biological warfare against an adversary—and against international convention.
I would be the last to condone Bashar Al-Assad’s brutal regime. But I also have questions about many of the groups fighting against it in the civil war that has already claimed 100,000 lives, 2 million refugees, a million internally displaced persons, and destroyed untold numbers of World Heritage sites. There is evidence some opposition groups have committed crimes as despicable as those of which Assad stands accused. When it comes to civil warfare, it’s always a complex picture, and outsiders rarely have access to all the facts. Despite our genuine horror when confronted with such abuse, the best course of action is almost always a policy of economic and diplomatic pressure, negotiation, and empowerment of world bodies such as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice at The Hague. They are the legitimate entities established to handle such situations.
Yet the United States government is again ready to act from a position of force to exert its will. Most disappointing, perhaps, is the fact that our president, with his Nobel Peace Prize, is leading the charge. This time, though, the vast majority of US citizens are saying no. Refusals to go along with the plan come from many different political positions: from Right to Left, Tea Party isolationists to war-hating pacifists and other radicals, as well as thoughtful moderates of every stripe.
The outcome, so important to Syria—because a so-called surgical strike will necessarily maim and kill even more of its citizens, and because US intervention will surely wreak havoc throughout the Middle East—is also vital as a test of our democracy here at home. Whether or not the American will ends up meaning anything at all will be a decisive test of our democratic process. In our much touted democracy, is there any democracy left, or has the word become a meaningless construct?
September 11, 2013