9/11 triggered U.S. decline

What a toll this decade has taken on the U.S., said Gregor Peter Schmitz in the Hamburg Der Spiegel. Just before the attacks of Sept. 11, America “was in full bloom.” The economy was booming. George W. Bush had “inherited a fat budget surplus.” The U.S. was “the indispensable nation” in global affairs—Europeans couldn’t even solve the problem of Kosovo, in our own backyard, without U.S. help. On the day after the attacks, the world rallied to the American cause, “and for a brief moment, the superpower seemed even more powerful than ever.” Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat personally donated blood for the 9/11 victims. “Even the French all suddenly wanted to be Americans.” And 10 years later? The U.S. is unrecognizable. Bitterly divided against itself, the country has become “distrustful, fearful, and defensive—against Muslims, against foreigners, against anyone who is different.”

The terrorists won, said Bernd Pickert in the Berlin Die Tages­zeitung. If al Qaida’s goal was to goad the superpower into self-destruction, “the Bush administration succeeded admirably in complying.” By launching two wars, at a cost of trillions of dollars and rising, the U.S. carried out “a massive transfer of money and resources from the national treasury into the pockets of the military-industrial complex.” Military budgets have ballooned to the point that the U.S. now spends more than all other countries in the world put together. And that’s not even counting the massive costs of the new Homeland Security Department and Transportation Security Agency. The financial meltdown facing the U.S. can be directly traced to this insane overspending on defense against a small band of terrorists.

There is also “another, less tangible, cost,” said Neil Tweedie in the London Telegraph. America has abandoned its claim to the moral high ground—and not just by killing some 140,000 civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. First it violated the sovereignty of allies by kidnapping suspected terrorists—many of them entirely innocent. Then came the practice of “extraordinary rendition,” whereby those suspects were shipped off to other countries for torture. Then torture was embraced as an American tactic, when CIA agents waterboarded suspects at “black sites.” And finally we have outright assassinations, in the form of drone attacks. All these Bush administration policies “have sullied the country’s reputation” beyond repair.

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Don’t blame Bush alone, said Tariq Ali in the London Guardian. The imperialist adventure he began continues apace. “Apart from Obama’s windy rhetoric, little now divides this administration from its predecessor.” Obama has deported more immigrants and prosecuted more whistle-blowers than Bush. He has failed to close Guantánamo, and he renewed the Patriot Act. He increased the use of drones, killing untold numbers of Pakistani families. He even started a third war in a Muslim land, Libya. And it won’t be the last. In the words of Gen. David Petraeus, whom Obama named head of the CIA, “This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.”