[Today’s run: nothing yet]
Today is September 11, 2015, the 14th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 2001.
At that time I still lived in Colorado. I was at work and the break room television was on covering all of the events in New York. I expect we probably were watching CNN since the break room TV had cable.
I remember being very surprised when the buildings collapsed. I had been told in my architecture classes that no high-rise building with a working sprinkler system had ever come down due to fire.
After that came the retaliatory strikes in Afghanistan; the lead up to the war in Iraq; the quick overrun of Iraq; the long drawn-out attempt to build a civil government in Iraq; the abandonment of that effort and the slow abandonment of Afghanistan also.
I wouldn’t call myself an isolationist, but I also think we were/are fighting an up-hill battle against a culture and life philosophy, not just military equipment. I remember prior to the Iraq invasion reading Thomas Friedman, a NY Times columnist and supposed middle east expert. He was for the invasion, and he said that it would be our responsibility to build a civil society after removing the Hussein regime. Looking back, I’m not so sure our efforts in that regard were worthwhile. Probably the right thing in a humanitarian sense but maybe not in a strategic sense.
I think the overall effort in Iraq and Afghanistan made some positive changes. A big one was to relieve pressure on Israel from Iraq. And there was a general overthrow of dictatorships in the middle east and northern Africa, backstopped by the failed internal attempts at reform in Iran.
Now we seem to be on the eve of a change in Iran’s status. I’d like to imagine that the president’s unilateral non-treaty releasing Iran from their sanctions will be the start of some sort of peaceful connection between the US and Iran. But I highly doubt it. I think it is more likely to become a reversal of the protections of Israel gained by the Iraq war, at minimum setting things back 15 years and at worst starting a nuclear arms race in the whole region.
And now we have a total meltdown in Syria and the rise of a Taliban-esque ISIS in Iraq with waves of refugees now heading to Europe. I’m a bit mystified as to why the refugees are only now going. Syria has been in this condition for a few years already. Do the refugees know something our media is not telling us?
If ISIS takes over Syria and Iran finishes their nukes it puts some nasty stuff on the northern border of Israel, the kind of stuff I’ve heard in various works about Armageddon.
On the other hand, there seems to be a recognition that fundamentalist Islam has some serious problems in the modern world. If someone spends their life and fortune hiding and plotting to do small-scale attacks against magazine publishers in France or small public gatherings in the US, that isn’t a war, it is desperation.