9-11 Have We Learned Anything?

The somber ceremony to honor the dead of September 11, 2001 dominates this day five years later. It’s tragic to hear family members talk about their loved ones.

It’s inspiring to know there are men and women willing to risk their lives for other humans. Christ speaks of sacrificing our lives for our brothers and sisters. Saints and spiritual people honor those who do.

I’m a person who writes with a good deal of anger fueling me. I hesitate to bring that anger to paper when discussing the events of five years ago. I can’t, however, let the day go by without comment.

I have to wonder if there is any true discussion by Americans about the reasons for the violent and horrific actions of those who perpetrated September 11, 2001. I know there is anger and even hate toward those who are responsible.

I don’t think of the dead Americans as being responsible for what happened to them. I don’t blame American people as responsible.

I do have to question our government’s involvement in the Middle East for well over a century, though. As I look at the policies of the U.S. in so many countries throughout the world, I come to understand why there is hatred for this nation.

The recent history is only one example of the mixed message of American democracy. A conservative estimate is fifty thousand innocent Iraqi citizens have perished as a result of the unilateral and preemptive war George W. Bush initiated.

It’s simple and easy to hear or see numbers of the dead in Iraq if we have no perspective of the people who died. Just as fanatics viewed all Americans as evil and the enemy, we depersonalize the Iraqi and Arabic people.

We fail to see the infant asleep in a crib crushed by the walls of the home of her parents following the detonation of a cruise missile fired from many miles away.

We fail to understand the sorrow of the parents who may have survived the anonymous death caused by the sophisticated weapon of mass destruction our nation’s people pay for with their taxes.

I can remember the face of a young girl covered with the blood of her parents shot at a check point by American troops. She was less than five years old. She had no understanding why strangers in her country would kill her parents. She couldn’t understand the policy of the time to shoot to kill any who failed to stop at checkpoints.

I’d ask the American people to think of New York’s World Trade Center destruction happening over and over again in Detroit, Cleveland, DesMoines, Denver, Omaha, Salt Lake, San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

If we could imagine such a thing we would have an idea of how innocent civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon feel. We’d have an idea of innocent Israeli citizens killed by rockets of people they never met or knew.

The attack in New York City was such a rarity for the American people to try to understand that five years later the nation is still absorbed in the grief and tragedy of that day. For Iraqis a form of September 11, 2001 happens on some scale almost daily.

Imagine hospitals and schools hit by explosive devices dropped from jets miles above in Mobile or Austin. Or snipers shooting from schools at anybody or anything moving in Phoenix.

The reality is this region of the world has known such terror and havoc for many decades. The people have seen the oppression of the Shah of Iran’s secret police torturing their own citizens.

The people of the region have seen British invasions of the most religious sites of their world. They have seen children starved as a result of sanctions meant to punish a dictator who gained his power by cooperation with the American government. That dictator went unscathed by sanctions.

We have heard of Abu Ghraib and Fallujah. Few of us know the truth of these places or the deep resentment and hatred American policy caused there. We think of the destruction and torture as the cost of freedom because freedom isn’t free.

The innocent civilians of Abu Ghraib and Fallujah are left with the overriding impression of American brutality causing unnecessary death and pain. They’re left with the images of bombs made in America killing children and the elderly and destroying homes that families lived in for many generations.

If Americans living in homes on land their families settled in the 1700’s or 1800’s saw it destroyed they could have an understanding of what humans in the Middle East have endured.

It is right the American people honor the dead of the attacks of September 11, 2001. We should never forget that day as we’ve not forgotten December 7, 1941 and the attack on Pearl Harbor.

A question that stays in my mind is did we learn anything other than hate from the attack? Do we understand the pain and suffering we felt in seeing the towers tumble to the streets and the loss of so many lives is repeated daily in some smaller scale in the Middle East?

The losses have become a constant of living in Iraq. Can Americans understand we are not the only nation to endure such tragedy? In fact we have been blessed with far less tragedy than most countries.

Can America do a search of its soul and see hatred has been bred and fueled because of needless and arrogant actions of our government’s policies toward Arab and Muslim people?

It doesn’t dishonor the victims of 9-11 to ask the hard questions of why such a horrible event was perpetrated against innocent people. I’d say it actually honors the memory of our dead to do so.

I just wonder if we can.


Wm. Terry Leichner, RN
VVAW – Denver
USMC combat veteran