Was 9/11 the beginning of the end for America? In the 22 years since the attacks, I’ve begun to worry that the answer to that question is “yes.”
It spawned the worst and most destructive foreign policy in the country’s history. The government response to 9/11 birthed the constitutional abomination that is the modern warrantless surveillance state. The Patriot Act enabled the government to weaponize its vast resources against its own people.
Bush’s failed foreign policy led directly to Obama’s presidency, and indirectly to Biden’s, both of which are responsible for diminishing the U.S. at home and abroad, militarily and economically. After two failed forever wars that wouldn’t have happened without 9/11, our government is now desperately trying to foment a potentially nuclear forever war against Russia.
Meanwhile, all the massive surveillance powers claimed by the U.S. after 9/11 are being ruthlessly deployed against American political enemies of the regime via the most insidious censorship-industrial complex the world has ever seen.
And then there’s the crippling legacy of debt enabled by America’s response to 9/11. Not content to spend trillions on poorly thought out invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, our leaders spent as thoughtlessly at home, creating insane amounts of new entitlements, while doing nothing to put the country on a sound financial footing.
And where are we today? The ruling political party is criminalizing its opposition and attempting to throw its top political opponent and his supporters in prison, all under the guise of “democracy.”
While the national unity in the days after the towers fell was unfortunately fleeting, the changes to the country, its laws, and its leaders were not. Perhaps there’s no better example of this than watching the man who scoffed during a presidential debate at the notion of America engaging in global “nation-building” suddenly declare that it was America’s mission to spread democracy to the ends of the earth with the “ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”
It is clear that 9/11 spawned the most destructive foreign policy in modern American history. Instead of simply eliminating the Taliban and the terrorist havens in Afghanistan — an objective that had largely been achieved by the end of 2001 — the U.S. government insisted on grafting Western democracy onto the people of Afghanistan. Without 9/11, there is no 20-year forever war in Afghanistan that ends with China in control of an American airbase and the Taliban in control of tens of billions of dollars of American military equipment and weapons.
Hellbound and Down 