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November 29, 2004
That Pre-9/11 Mindset
Critics of the current régime's so-called "War on Terror" are often accused of having a "September 10th" or "pre-9/11" mindset. (Our ever-articulate Prince President garbled both descriptions into the phrase "pre-September 10th mentality" during the first debate.) The suggestion is that everyone's worldview should have been radically transformed by the events of September 11th; anyone whose worldview wasn't so altered, anyone who continues to favour diplomacy over a resort to military force, must simply be blind to reality.
But there's a problem with this argument: it assumes that everyone's worldview needed changing. After all, any worldview that was radically altered by the September 11th attacks must have been radically mistaken to begin with. But anyone whose understanding of the world was substantially correct would not have had his or her overall view of things shaken by those events.
Why didn't more of us ("us" being those of the anti-war/anti-state persuasion, whether "left" or "right") abandon our way of thinking in response to 9/11? Because 9/11 didn't teach us anything we didn't already know. We've been saying for decades that the U.S. government's arrogant interventions around the world have only been increasing the risk of blowback, and that the State, in the event of such blowback, would be as ineffective at protecting the civilian population as it is at everything else. The 9/11 attacks simply corroborated our "pre-9/11 mindset."
If you read the whole column (and you should), notice the nice zinger Long gets in as the last paragraph. It's a satisfying conclusion to a great column.
Posted by Mike Tennant at November 29, 2004 04:04 PM