A World That Might Have Been

In everyone's lifetime, there is an event so different, so dramatic, so unlike every day life, that it causes people to say: "I remember exactly what I was doing when..." For my grandparents, it was Pearl Harbor. For my mother, it was JFK's assassination. For my generation, it was 9/11. I was working from home, and got a call to turn on the TV, just before the second plane hit the WTC. 9/11 and America's subsequent rush to war marks a pivotal change in the world, a before and after event standing between two different worlds.

So whenever I discover facts about that event, that time, and what happened after, that cause me to question what happened, why it happened, they cause me to question my entire frame of reference for the world.

The first WTC attack, the Al Qaeda attacks on US African embassies, the USS Cole bombing, the second WTC attack. They were described as a war by terrorists that required not one but two wars against enemies. We were told that war was necessary, that we could no longer rely on pre-9/11 thinking, we could no longer rely on judicial proceedings, that only war would work.

After 9/11, how many Americans wanted justice? How many wanted vengeance? Regardless of whether it was 1% or 100%, the administration wanted it, and they were determined to have it. However, just before 9/11, four Al Qaeda operatives were given life sentences for the 1998 suicide bombings of the American embassies in East Africa. What would our world be like today if the Bush Administration had sought a judicial, instead of a war, resolution in 9/11? The FBI's New York Office and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of N.Y. already had an indictment for Osama bin Laden at the time of 9/11.

Would the Iraq invasion have occurred? How much better would America's reputation be if the entire WMD controversy never had occurred? How much better off would the government bottom line if some of the $4 trillion that was spent in the post-9/11 global war not been fought? The 2008 financial crisis has been blamed on everything from loose lending standards for mortgages to the poor to lax regulatory standards on big banks. One reason for the 2008 financial crisis that most accept is the creation of too much debt. How much of that was due to the debt created by an un-funded war on terror?

James Risen's new book Pay Any Price Greed Power and Endless War has a number of vignettes illustrating how unbelievable amounts of money were spent in the war on terror. It is tempting to state that unbelievable amounts of money were destroyed, thrown away, wasted. But, of course, they weren't. The money went somewhere. The money went to people "on the in". People with pull, people with a connection. The sad thing is that these people, by and large, don't need more. And they money came from people that couldn't afford it.

President Eisenhower, that last president with the guts to say "Enough is enough", also said the following:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road. The world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Where were you when the first documented case of Ebola transmission in America was announced? Perhaps wondering if some of those $4 trillion spent on a war on terror might have been better spent on research? On hospitals? On health worker education? Maybe its time we declare the end to the war on terror, before it eats us alive.