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* sigh *

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22 years on and this is pretty much how I feel about 9-11.  It is as remote to me as the day I took our son to get passport pictures taken and viewed the first hit on the World Trade Center on televisions in a Sony shop on Gediminas Ave. in Vilnius.  We were planning to go to America the following summer but decided to put it off a couple years and didn't go until 2008.

As it turns out these persons weren't so detached as the photograph appears to indicate.  Walter Sipser, one of the men in the photo, later said he was in a profound state of shock and disbelief seeing it happen and that the photographer simply captured them talking.  Yet, the picture was interpreted by many as representing them totally aloof to the crisis unfolding.  

Whatever the case, I just don't have much feeling toward those events anymore and avoid posting or commenting on the numerous images my friends continue to post on facebook.  One of my friends even went so far to ask his followers to post what they were doing the moment the first plane hit the towers and he got over 120 responses.  So, it still burns in the eyes of many.

My feeling that day was one of disbelief followed by this is what happens when you meddle in affairs all around the world.  As Malcolm X infamously said when John F. Kennedy was shot, "it was a case of chickens coming home to roost."  Of course he was vilified for that comment, which is understandable given the love so many felt toward JFK.  But, I have to wonder why we are still mourning so many years later an event that was foreshadowed by the numerous terrorist attacks during the Clinton administration.

Clinton had wisely bolstered the national security council team, headed by Richard Clarke, and was keeping tabs on al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world.  He used the intelligence to order strikes on bin Laden's pharmaceutical labs in Sudan, which his administration believed was manufacturing chemical and biological weapons.  They knew something big was in the works, they just didn't imagine something so low-tech and plotted entirely within American boundaries.  Still, they had most of the assailants under surveillance.

For whatever reason George Bush, who was contentiously elected in 2000, chose to ignore and virtually shelf the advisory committee when he came into office the following year.  He had bigger fish to fry I guess.  Clarke vociferously complained about this but his warnings fell on deaf ears.  This allowed the terrorist cells to go underground and resurface when everyone least expected them.  The indelible image of Bush that fateful day was being caught reading a children's book in a Miami elementary school before being whisked away on Air Force One to undisclosed landing sites, including one in Nebraska, out of fear he might be a target.  When he finally resurfaced many hours later he tried to pitch national unity.  He visited the site after the smoke and dust had cleared and made one of his better speeches during his long tenure.

Sadly what followed was a foreign policy nightmare that still lingers to this day.  Bush declared not one but two wars against imaginary aggressors.  Americans backed him for the most part until things bogged down in Afghanistan with no sight of bin Laden, who was held personally accountable for the attack.  It was clear at this point that the Bush administration was less interested in bringing bin Laden to justice than it was in re-establishing its hegemony in the Middle East, as the "war on terror" drifted to Iraq and Syria.  Al Qaeda had morphed into ISIS, or Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, treating this as a jihad.  Terrorist experts decried his policies but to no avail. Bush and his closest advisors, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, were determined to get the upper hand in the region.

Palestine drifted into the background as well.  Attempts to broker a deal at the end of Clinton's administration had evaporated.  No one cared anymore.  All the talk was about the ongoing battle with ISIS.  We had opportunities to make allies with Iran, who was as much against ISIS as we were, but old enmities stood in the way.  The American standing in the UN deteriorated to the point many Americans felt we should withdraw entirely.  As it was, the Bush administration quit paying its dues and made a mockery of the council by naming John Bolton as the US ambassador to the UN for two tumultuous years.  It was literally like we were thumbing our noses in everyone's faces leading former VP Al Gore to quip that America had lost the good will of the world.

For a brief while it seemed the mood had changed.  Barack Obama was surprisingly elected president in 2008 and everyone thought the US would turn a new leaf, a fig leaf if you will.  Obama was even awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 but in his acceptance speech he defended the use of force following 911 and continued the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.  The situation in Iraq eventually stabilized but continued to fester in Afghanistan with no end in sight as the Taliban retook large swathes of the country with the government we helped put in place seemingly powerless to do anything about it.

To Obama's credit, he did try to repair relations with Iran with the hope of containing the Taliban and other Sunni radical movements but that all came undone within the first two years of the Trump administration, which turned its back on the nuclear agreement that Obama had signed and essentially ceded Iran back to Russia's sphere of influence.  Afghanistan too, as it turned out.

Throughout these wars, Russia had pretty much taken a back seat.  At times cooperative in allowing the US to use its air bases enroute to Afghanistan and other times adversarial in allegedly putting bounties on American heads in the country.  No one quite knew where Putin stood as he played his cat and mouse game.  He had bigger objectives and I guess wanted to keep American forces occupied as much as possible.  A situation very similar to Vietnam.

In the end we spent trillions on these wars with the only appreciable gains being in Iraq, which had nothing to do with 911, despite the Bush administration's best efforts to make the case before the UN Security Council.  Afghanistan is right back to where it was before 911.

Yet, we are all supposed to still grieve for the events that took place on that ill-fated day.

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