Our country has been at war for almost five years. Monday will mark the fifth anniversary of attacks on the World Trade Center and The Pentagon, an event which will be looked back on by our generation as our equivalent to Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination. In the past five years, the United States has fought two major wars, both of which continue to this day. The Afghan war, which at first looked like a qualified success, has seen the resurgence of the Taliban. In Iraq, American soldiers are perishing daily, and that has turned the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers into a throbbing sore of civil war between different religions and ethnic groups. At home civil liberties have been curtailed. The government has been accused of monitoring civilian phone lines, condoning torture and lying their way into the Iraq war, among other acts. Americans, once known as a people who, at least superficially, loved liberty, have grown to accept an increasing loss of rights in order to protect themselves from the specter of terrorism. I don’t want my words to be misunderstood. I have no sympathy with Osama bin Laden’s asinine philosophy or Baathist states, and I do not “hate America.” I would prefer death to subjugation under the type of totalitarian religious regime that those who advocate al Qaeda-like beliefs offer. At this point, however, we ought to confront the history of terror in this country before we declare a war on a vague idea. Our nation was founded on bloodshed. Let there be no mistake, it was a violent struggle to take this land. American Indians and European Americans spent the better part of 200 years slaughtering one another in an attempt to either hold on to or gain control of land. Loyalist and Patriot militias waged brutal campaigns against one another during our Revolution. In our War Between the States, we glorify the depredations of men like William Quantrill, who massacred hundreds in Lawrence, Kan., for the Confederacy, or Gen. William T. Sherman, who some believe is worthy of having a building named after him at this University, whose terrorist actions against the civilian population of the South ought to have brought him shame instead of glory. After that war ended, some disenfranchised former Confederates donned white robes and waged a terrorist campaign against black citizens and the Reconstructionist government of the South. Though the organization was broken up, many participants in that Klan and its future variations were rewarded with both state and federal offices. Presidents, most notably Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley, were brought down by terrorists. John Wilkes Booth and his conspiracy sought to bring the Yankee government to its knees in the dying days of the war. They tried this not with planes but with derringers and knives, and were it not for the ineptitude of a few of the would-be assassins, they may well have succeeded. McKinley was killed by anarchist. Leon Czolgosz, and his death led to a sort of dirty war against those professing anarchism that climaxed during the Red Scare of the late 1910s to the early 1920s. Terrorism is not an ideology; it is a method. As long as we continue to be distracted by minor despots in countries like Iran or the starvation state known as North Korea, we shall never manage to actually defeat those who attacked this country five years ago. I claim no special knowledge of geo-politics or governmental affairs. Nor am I peacenik, though I was against the Iraq war before it began and believe that we owe it to those who are fighting in Iraq to remove them from the conflict before one more life is sacrificed for a lost cause in Mesopotamia. Five years on and Osama bin Laden remains at large. Across the Middle East anti-American parties such as Hamas and Hezbollah claim new adhederents, in part due to the anti-American reaction our invasion of Iraq brought about. All the while the perpetual obsession with new fears and new demons Iraq yesterday, Iran today and who knows tomorrow-only serves to further the interests of those who would use terrorism as an end to further their agendas. Monday ought to be a time to reflect on lives lost not only on Sept. 11, 2001, but throughout this war. And let us honestly reflect on where this country is going and how many more lives and liberties we want to sacrifice in the blind pursuit of neo-Wilsonian world building.
—–Contact Ryan Merryman at [email protected]