Ten Years After, The Terrorists Have Won

On September 11, 2001, 19 criminals, 15 of them from Saudi Arabia, hijacked 4 airliners flew them into the Pentagon and the twin Towers of the World Trade Center killing around 3000 people from all over the world and from many different faiths.

This attack was funded and orchestrated by Osama Bin Laden.

On May 2, 2011, a team of 24 U.S. Navy Seals, guided by civilian intelligence agencies and authorized by the civilian Commander in Chief, overtook Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, ran him to ground and shot him dead.

19 people started it, 24 people ended it.

The loss of life on 9/11 was a tragedy.

But the greater tragedy is what took place between 9/11/2001 and 5/2/2011.

Rather than pursuing the rational path of using existing international laws to find those responsible and bring them to justice, the United States started two wars of aggression. One of which, in Afghanistan, was marginally justified because that is where the Saudi criminals received their training. The other, in Iraq, had no justification whatsoever.

These two wars have cost the United States over $1,000,000,000,000.00 (that's one trillion) and have killed over a million human beings on all sides of the conflicts.

In the wake of 9/11, Americans could not strip themselves of their privacy and their freedom fast enough in exchange for the promise of "safety". "You can strip search us, monitor our financial transactions and eavesdrop on every communication we have with anyone if you just promise to keep the Bogeyman away."

Some of us tried to put on the brakes and say "Are we sure we want to do this? Once we give up our freedom and our privacy, we will never get it back." We were labelled as unpatriotic and traitors who wanted he terrorists to win.

All of a sudden it was fashionable to be racist. It was perceived as "OK" to hate Muslims just for being Muslim.

We trashed our Constitution, we turned a national surplus into a crippling debt that threatens the world wide economy, we willingly and enthusiastically abandoned every American value that made this country great.

The terrorists didn't destroy us. They just gave us an excuse to destroy ourselves. Which under the "leadership" of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, we were all too eager and willing to do.

That's the real tragedy of today. It's not just the loss of life 10 years ago. It's the collapse and implosion of America at the hands of the Republicans.

Rather than responding to 9/11 rationally and intelligently, they chose to go into a militaristic rage and stomp all over the world in a Texas Tantrum.

We will never win this "war". We will never kill or capture The Last Terrorist. We will keep killing people with our robots, alienating the rest of the world and spiralling down an economic decline. China and India will soar past us on the world stage and we will become a once great but now diminished world power like the Greeks, the Persians, the Romans, the French, the Ottomans, the British.

History will say the peak of American power was from 1945 to 1989 with the peak being the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Our decline began a few years later with Watergate. Just 44 years at the top of the world.

We had so much potential. We had such good intentions. Such high ideals.

And we pissed it all away. We handed over our lunch money in exchange for a promise to protect us from the schoolyard bully.

Yes. The terrorists have won. But the victory isn't theirs.

We did this to ourselves.