9/11: Just think about it!

Every nation has its right and solemn duty to mourn and remember its dead.

In the hour that I write this blog entry today, eleven years ago I was driving to my work in Delaware. As usual, I listened to NPR in my car and heard that an airplane hit one of the WTC towers. I didn’t make much of it, thought that a disoriented Cessna, Mooney, or similar small private plane clipped its wing on the tall building. When I arrived to work, I saw people glued to the TV screens in public areas of my hospital. With incredulous horror on their face nurses, patients, visitors, and doctors were watching again and again the replay of a large passenger plane flying into the second WTC tower. Then, we heard about the attack on the Pentagon and the plane that crashed in remote Pennsylvania.

At one point during the day President Bush declared that the Nation was under attack.

Fortunately, it turned out not to be a full-scale assault on the country rather, a sort of “hit and run” terror act where the attackers actually didn’t plan on running away. It served much as a symbolic warning to the mightiest nation of the world, that they were not immune to deadly aggression.

Yes, a symbolic act, with the loss of nearly 3,000 not so symbolic lives. Innocent lives at that, lives that in no way deserved being extinguished by burning airplane fuel, collapsing walls, or desperate jumps to their death from a skyscraper turned inferno.

Then, the country buried its dead, cleared the debris and prepared for retaliation.

And retaliation it was. First Afghanistan, then Iraq. As a direct result of the US/British invasion, between 105,000-1,000,000 people died in Iraq alone. The Iraq Body Count (IBC) project estimated 105-114,000 civilian deaths and a total of 162,000 deaths as a result of the conflict. The Opinion Research Business survey put the number over 1 million, whereas the much criticized Lancet survey, limited to 2003-2006 only, put the death toll over 600,000.

I don’t include Afghan war casualties here because there was a civil war at the time of the US attack and it would be hard to estimate the number of victims directly linked to the invasion itself. But Iraq was in a relative peace, with violent death rate not exceeding that of the surrounding countries.

Strange to play with the number of prematurely dead people: 100,000 or 1,000,000? Really? Is that what America and Britain did in that far away corner of the world?

And there is one other thing: not one of those people, not even the evil Saddam Hussein, had any responsibility whatsoever for the 9/11 tragedy in the US.

By the most pessimistic accounts, the Iraq casualties translate to a 9/11 in Iraq every single day of an entire year! And if we insist that the more conservative numbers are closer to reality, than a 9/11 hit Iraq every day for over one month. How can the people of America live and mourn without giving a fleeting thought to the victims of the unprovoked war started by the US?

The war in Iraq is sort of over by now for the US. But in Iraq the bloody consequences continue. In 2011 the IBC reported 4102 civilian deaths in Iraq from violence; more than another 9/11 for a country with 1/10th the US population. And this happened ten years after the original tragedy. With this rate of killings, over 40,000 US citizens would lose their life to violence every year.

A meaningful remembrance of 9/11 should include our sorrow for those who died that day and our regret for what followed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If we intend to learn one meaningful lesson from the tragedy of 9/11, then we need to learn to confront the consequences of our reaction to it. In the midst of our own pain, somehow we continue to ignore the hurt we caused to others.

And this sort of selfish self-pity, apparently deeply rooted in human nature, has been the main propelling force throughout history for the endless cycles of violence.

It’s high time to start eroding the force behind these cycles.

And we can start this slow transition with a prayer for the dead of Iraq if we’re religious, or with a thought of “I’m so sorry that it happened to you all, poor dead people!”