On Monday evening the BBC Radio Five Live’s program “Pods and Blogs” has invited me on the air to discuss the five-year anniversary of the attacks which took place on September 11th, 2001 in NYC, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania. Anyone interested can listen here at 9p.m. EST/6p.m. PST ( I will probably be on ~20 minutes into the program).

The truth is that I don’t yet know what I am going to talk about or what profound statement I can possibly make in my minute of air time. There is just so much that has occurred in these past five years that to draw any kind of grand conclusion or offer a sagacious reflection seems impossible. From a federal government facility I watched (like many of you) my federal government and its citizens get attacked on that day. Later I learned that a friend had perished in New York. If I had to condense all of my thoughts five years later down to a single word it would be…”disappointment.”

On September 11th, 2001 I believe that our nation was handed, hidden beneath the shock, the sadness, and the loss, an opportunity to lead. Our generation was given a chance to become the greatest generation. In the 1940s, faced with the threat of a fascist and racist power bent on world domination, the United States and its men and women rose up to defend much of that world, not only through our arms but through our thoughts and ideas. Our allies admired us because of our spirit and our tenacity. They admired us for our can-doism and they admired us for our morality. That admiration lasted through the Cold War and past the end of communism. On September 11th we showed everyone why America was, decades later, still worthy of that admiration:

A California man identified as Tom Burnett reportedly called his wife and told her that somebody on the plane [United 93] had been stabbed.

”We’re all going to die, but three of us are going to do something,” he told her. “I love you honey…” [Link]

You can wade through all of these interview files for additional reminders of how Americans responded when called upon to lead. Even the President got it right at first:

I can hear you, the rest of the world can hear you and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon. [Link]

However, shortly after is where my disappointment begins. Five years later can it be said that anyone (even our closest allies) really “hears us?” Can it be said that America is admired for how it responded in the years following the attacks? Does anyone feel safer? I am disappointed because we have not honored the memories of those who perished by living up to the examples that they set for us. Sacrifice and inner strength and not blind fury or angry words were the weapons that Americans used on that day.

In her op-ed piece about the five-year anniversary, Peggy Noonan admires the concise last words uttered by many that died that day and notes that “crisis is a great editor.” If that is true then it is a shame that these days we seem to waste so much time with empty rhetoric and actions which divert our nation ever farther from our chance at greatness.

I thought a good place to start reflecting upon the past five years would be to first take a look at where we stand at the present:

A majority of Canadians believe U.S. foreign policy was one of the root causes that led to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and Quebecers are quicker to criticize the U.S. administration for its international actions than other Canadians, a recent poll suggests.

Those conclusions are found in a newly released poll conducted by Leger Marketing for the Association for Canadian Studies.

The poll suggests that 77 per cent of Quebecers polled primarily blame American foreign policy for the Sept. 11 attacks. The results suggest 57 per cent in Ontario hold a similar view. [Link]

Within a year our closest strategic ally will have a new leader:

According to a poll released yesterday by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, British support for American leadership in foreign affairs has never been lower — a policy whose poster boy is Tony Blair. This summer, even some of Blair’s Cabinet loyalists were upset when he once more forcefully backed a deeply unpopular Bush policy: refusing to criticize Israel’s strategy or tactics in Lebanon or call for an immediate cease-fire. Blair’s transformation today into official lame duck means all the European leaders who backed the Iraq war — Spain’s Jose Maria Aznar, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and Poland’s Leszek Miller — have paid the ultimate political price. [Link]

This weekend the U.S. military’s chief logistics planner at the time of the attacks revealed that the decision to go to war in Iraq was made very shortly after the correct decision to topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. He also revealed that Rumsfeld and the administration refused to consider the possibility that we would have to stay in Iraq for any length of time.

In 2001, Scheid was a colonel with the Central Command, the unit that oversees U.S. military operations in the Mideast.

On Sept. 10, 2001, he was selected to be the chief of logistics war plans.

On Sept. 11, he said, “life just went to hell.”

That day, Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of Central Command, told his planners, including Scheid, to “get ready to go to war.”

A day or two later, Rumsfeld was “telling us we were going to war in Afghanistan and to start building the war plan. We were going to go fast.

“Then, just as we were barely into Afghanistan, Rumsfeld came and told us to get ready for Iraq…”

“The secretary of defense continued to push on us that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we’re going to take out the regime, and then we’re going to leave,” Scheid said. “We won’t stay.”

Scheid said the planners continued to try “to write what was called Phase 4,” or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like security, stability and reconstruction.

Even if the troops didn’t stay, “at least we have to plan for it,” Scheid said.

”I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that,” Scheid said. “We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today. [Link]

On Friday the Republican-chaired Senate Intelligence Committee revealed as clearly as possible that not only did Saddam have no connection to Al-Qaida, he in fact wanted to hunt down al-Zarqawi himself:

The Senate intelligence committee [this past] Friday said it had found no evidence that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al-Qaida or provided safe harbor to one of its most notorious operatives, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — conclusions contradicting claims by the Bush administration before it invaded Iraq.

In a long-awaited report, the committee determined that the former Iraqi dictator was wary of Al-Qaida, repeatedly rebuffed requests from its leader, Osama bin Laden, for assistance and sought to capture Zarqawi when the deadly terrorist turned up in Baghdad. [Link]

And still much of the public, which now more than ever needs to build a greater awareness of events beyond these shores, remains ignorant of basic facts:

Some adults in the United States remain convinced that the former Iraqi president played a role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to three recent public opinion polls. In a survey by Zogby International, 46 per cent of respondents think there is a link between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda plot.

In studies by Opinion Research Corporation released by CNN and CBS News, 43 per cent and 31 per cent of respondents respectively believe Hussein was personally involved in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. [Link]

Other Americans remain equally oblivious to reality, actually believing that our government was directly involved in the attacks on that day.

The 9/11 commission was tasked with figuring out what went wrong and how to prevent it from ever happening again. Here is their report card which shows how far we had come by 2005. It is only five pages long and every American should be familiar with what it says. Achieving grades of A’s and B’s on all these items would make me feel a lot safer than simply taking the fight to some amorphous enemy that seems to get larger with every bomb we drop on “him.” I have no doubt that it would cost far less as well. The foreign policy section of the report card, which I am sure will be of interest to many SM readers, is particularly insightful.

Five years later I am still waiting for our leaders to lead. I think many of us were up to the challenge of 9/11 but that our resolve has turned to cynicism and frustration. We have been misled and manipulated by the political party in power and uninspired by the other one. I think that musician Neil Young captures it best on his new album:

Lookin’ for a Leader
To bring our country home
Re-unite the red white and blue
Before it turns to stone

Lookin’ for somebody
Young enough to take it on
Clean up the corruption
And make the country strong… [Link]

Noonan is right. Crisis is a great editor. With only seconds to think, the heroes of 9/11 made difficult decisions with admirable clarity. Since 9/11 we have let the thought of vengeance and the need to appear tough at all costs supercede the need for more patient and nuanced action. We have also lost the morality that they exemplified. Sending U.S. soldiers to die under the guise of “preserving freedom and our way of life” is easier than fighting for hearts and minds and maintaining the moral high ground. We have hurt ourselves more than we have hurt the terrorists that seek to do us harm. If we lose the “War on Terror” it certainly won’t be at the hands of any terrorists, but slowly by our own (in)actions. At home our civil liberties continue to be eroded. We can’t travel abroad without someone explaining to us how we Americans are ruining the world. Does anyone believe that the “War Against Terrorism” or “The War Against Islamo-Fascism” or whatever we are calling it today can be won by any means other than by winning the hearts and minds of the societies that harbor terrorists? If you consider 9/11 to be the date of the first battle of this war then the body count shows that our side lost ~3000 lives compared to 19. And yet…in almost every way that matters we won that first battle. We won the hearts and mind of the world on that day. They saw Americans die fighting against an amoral and cowardly enemy. They understood then that the idea of America was greater than the idealogy that sought to destroy it. They also believed that we would win. That is no longer true in the eyes of too many around the world.

And what about us in the South Asian American community? We are caught in the middle in many respects. We are as patriotic as any American and yet we are not always seen as such simply because of our appearance. Our thoughts about the conflict are often more nuanced because many of us have seen first hand the conditions which result in a fundamentalist idealogy. We know that weapons alone will do no good. We especially dread the next large attack. We know it will happen eventually. We are as worried about what will happen after the attack.

Five years later all this is going through my head. I am writing this post because I’d like to hear from some of you as well. I doubt that all of our thoughts can be condensed into a minute or two of radio time but perhaps a little group reflection would do us good. Beneath the pessimism I harbor some hope that there may still be some time to set our wrong course right. That won’t happen however, until we all become more engaged and demand more from our leaders. We owe this to everyone who died on that day.