The twin tragedies of 9/11

As this week’s commemorations of the attacks that took place on Sept. 11, 2001 continue, it is appropriate that the country pause to remember those who were lost and injured in the attacks and our response to them as well as those who distinguished themselves seeking to protect America and the values we hold dear.

The wounds of that day and the scars they have left on our society are such that they are certain to be felt by most of us who were alive that day for the rest of our lives.

That said, it does not diminish — indeed, it enhances — those moments of remembrance if we take the time to acknowledge and consider those who have been the innocent victims of America’s grotesque, unjustifiable overreaction to those attacks. 

The numbers vary, but it is certain that well over 100,000 and perhaps as many as a million innocent Iraqis, Afghans, and Pakistanis have been killed as a result of America’s efforts to seek revenge for our losses. That means, even the lowest estimates of collateral damage associated with our invasion of Iraq alone from groups like the Associated Press, the Iraq Family Health Survey, or the Iraq Body Count Project, suggest that between 30 and 50 times as many Iraqis died as a result of our invasion as died in 9/11 attacks — which, of course, had no relationship whatsoever to the country in which they lived. Higher estimates, like those of the Lancet or the Opinion Research Business Survey, suggest totals 200 to 300 times higher. In Afghanistan too, civilians paid for our military intervention with their lives in multiples of our 9/11 losses.

These losses too involved mothers, fathers, and their children, bereavement and holes in the fabric of civilization that can never be mended. To ignore them is to recommit the crimes that led to both their deaths and those of the thousands who were lost in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon or in that field in Pennsylvania; it amounts once again to the valuing of the lives of those we know, those close to us, at a premium to those who are physically or culturally distant from us.

What happened that clear blue morning in early September a decade ago here in the United States was a ghastly example of the cost not just of misdirected fury but also of the disregard of the value of life, law and morality. So too were the losses that have come since.

To suggest that the tragedies of 9/11 took place exclusively on that day or that the victims worth mourning were exclusively Americans or our friends and allies is to misunderstand the nature not just of those tragedies but of tragedy in general. If we wish to mark those losses closest to us in a way that will reduce the likelihood of future such catastrophes or better, that will increase the likelihood of human progress away from such needless bloodletting, then we ought to spend time reflecting on the fate of those foreign, faceless others who died in the conflagrations that were ignited that day as well as on our own individual roles, however small, in promoting, rationalizing or ignoring America’s own crimes.

For the past ten years, our most visible commemoration of 9/11 has been the ways we sought vengeance, visiting death upon innocents purely based upon the pretext that our own suffering had been great. While we are pulling away and even repudiating the policies that were linked to our own misdeeds we should try to remember that calling one thing a policy and another a terrorist plot is an insufficient distinction to the dead.

A great tragedy took place on 9/11. It was compounded many times over in the decade since. Acknowledge both facts or invite the accusation that we have learned little or that we are no better than the enemies we condemn.