Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘The basic American policy response to 9/11 should have been to liberate ourselves from fossil fuels. Without our dependence on oil, we would never have been entangled in the Middle East in the first place. Most of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudis, citizens of an oil kingdom that we helped to build, our “ally.” The right reaction in September 2001 — as I wrote to a friend in the White House — was to fund fusion and other clean energy sources. Had we done so, we could have headed off global warming, prevented further Middle East wars — and indeed prevented the rise of Vladimir Putin’s hydrocarbon oligarchy and his invasions of Ukraine.

Today we face the reality of rising oceans, vast fires, and resource conflicts. We were given a chance to halt all of that.

But we did not take it. George W. Bush became president of the United States, despite probably losing an election to Al Gore, after the Supreme Court stopped the counting of ballots in Florida. Gore was an environmentalist who cared deeply about global warming. Had 9/11 happened during a Gore presidency, he would have intensified the search for safe energy. Gore was also a more experienced and competent person than Bush, who came from a political oil family and had done nothing notable himself. Had Gore been president, 9/11 might well not have happened. But it did happen, on the watch of the inexperienced oilman. Bush’s White House was never going to link the terror attack to its basic causes.

We did not do the right thing. Instead, Americans in power did what the terrorists wanted. They attacked us, said President Bush, because “they hate freedom.” And his reaction in domestic policy was to use the instruments of our own government to undo our own freedom.

The pertinent example was the formation of a Department of Homeland Security. It placed a grab-bag of agencies under a single authority, treating them all (for example, border management) as a matter of “security.” Yes, the bags of the terrorists should have been more carefully searched. Yes, international terrorism, which killed about 3,000 people that day, was a threat to be taken seriously. But other things made us insecure: for comparison, about 17,000 Americans were killed with handguns that year, about 19,000 died from drug overdoses, and about 21,000 from the lack of access to health care. Attaching the notion of “security” to one kind of threat made all the rest worse…

We are commemorating a quarter of a century since 9/11. I was in New York the night before and came back early in the morning to New Haven; when I learned what had happened, I went back to the train station and tried to go back to the city: but the station was closed. I went to a pizza joint and thought about what to say to my students in the next class. I wanted to teach them about Eastern Europe; that was my job. I didn’t want to cancel class; I wanted to somehow meet the challenge of what had just happened. And so I talked to them about how provocation works.

In Russian and East European history it is a major topic; I was writing a book about some of the operations. The Russian imperial secret services, and then the Soviet secret services, had perfected the art: rather than moving directly, provoke the other side, get them to do what you want for what they think are their own reasons. Hit them, but hit them with spin; get them to come around to where you want them, and to hurt themselves. This is very much how the Russian secret services still function. They supported Trump in every election because he was the way that Americans could most hurt and weaken themselves.

Terrorism, I said in the classroom in September 2001, twenty five years ago, can also work as a provocation. The provocateur need not be the state; it can also be the terrorists working against the state, trying to get the state to do something that hurts its own people. The weaker side can touch the vulnerabilities of the stronger. It can induce the stronger to act against its own interests.

Our failure to see this, of course, is the history of these twenty-five years. We were provoked, and we did what the terrorists wanted. And so, along with them, we have made a world in which terrorism is so normal that we hardly know when to use the word; it has become a propaganda cliché that state terrorists such as Putin and Trump use to define their enemies. And they are themselves, of course, state terrorists. The Trump phenomenon is unthinkable without 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. He was also helped by Russian support on social media. Then Trump himself normalized terrorism by seeking to stay in power by the use of force in January 2021.’ (from his Substack)