Since the Bushies have departed the political scene in Washington, we find that many of them are emerging from their burrows and holes in the ground to tell us that following the events of September 11, 2001, we were all scared spitless.  I have a clear recollection of my thoughts after the destruction of the World Trade Center and I may assure you that being scared spitless was nowhere among them.  My daughter who resides with her family on the island of Manhattan gave no indication that she was ever scared spitless. I live on a grand estate 18 rail miles directly west of the World Trade Center.  A small navigational error might have brought those two airplanes into my back yard.  My reactions to the events of September 11 were consternation over the suffering of the nearly 3000 people who lost their lives in that incident.  But I do not recall any Americans saying that they were scared spitless.
Yet we have Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the right-wing crowd telling us that we were all scared spitless and therefore torture of prisoners with Moslem names was justified.  Later developments suggest that there was a desperate attempt on the part of the Bushies to blame Sadam Hussein for the attack.  Even George Bush now denies that claim.
In recent weeks, we have had a crescendo of claims that aim at justifying the torture of our Moslem prisoners.  Dick Armey, the former Congressman from Texas, has tried to lead the charge.  Over the most recent weekend at the start of May, we find that Condoleezza Rice has joined in with a statement that makes no sense whatsoever.  Apparently Stanford University has agreed to take her back as a professor of something or other.  Condoleezza has been hip-deep in the events of 9/11 and her excuses for the failure of the Bush administration to act when Osama bin Laden issued a warning to us, are extremely lame.  Her testimony before the 9/11 Commission run by Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton was not to be believed.  And she was our National Security Advisor at the time!
There is a reason for our being attacked, and it goes to the big guy syndrome.  Throughout history, there have been attacks on the dominant powers.  You may recall that over the years when the British Empire was in power, it fought off insurgencies from the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish, the Indians, the Kenyans, and the West Africans.  The British Empire has passed into history and now, since 1941, it is our turn to be the big guy in the world’s operations.  On top of being the big guy, we are to the Moslems, complete infidels.  And so the attack on the World Trade Center had a religious component as well as being an attempt to bring the big guy down a notch or two.
When Yogi Berra was a catcher on a semi-pro club in St. Louis, he said that they always played much harder against a team that could afford uniforms.  I can recall that when our public school played John Burroughs, a private school, we tried to knock them off their perch.  The big guy syndrome has been with us since the beginning of time and will remain with us, perhaps until eternity.
So you see, any rational person will not agree with Condoleezza and Dick Armey and the rest when they tell you that we were all scared spitless.  That wasn’t the case in the attack on the World Trade Center and it redounds to the discredit of people like Madame Rice and Dick Armey to make that claim.
The evidence that we have at hand suggests that if the Bushies had been alert, they could have prevented the attack on the WorldTradeCenter.  But be that as it may, there is no rational reason to say that, even if we were scared spitless, this was a reason for torture to take place.  It is not.
Now, with respect to the big guy syndrome, you may have noticed that there is no attack on Uruguay, Bolivia, Finland or other small countries.  On the other hand, nearly everybody wants to beat the New York Yankees.  I suspect that this country is the big guy to the rest of the world, and I am delighted to have it remain so.
 
E. E. CARR
May 4, 2009
Essay 383
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Kevin’s commentary: It is certainly nice to live in a superpower. But that comes hand in hand with being a symbol of the “West” and everything that is wrong with it, which in turn makes the country a target. Despite this, what seems to be forgotten is that we are so disgustingly far ahead of everyone else militarily we could stand to cut back on spending quite a bit. That is, the U.S. alone accounts for 40% of total world military expenditures. Even IF we ignored pre-existing bases and equipment, and IF each dollar spent by China (the country with the 2nd highest military expenditures) was as efficient as each dollar spent by America — which it isn’t, not by a mile — we could still fight four Chinas at once, year to year.
So yeah, we’re not about to be attacked anytime soon, and if we’d ease off on the ‘world cop’ role just a little bit we’d probably be just fine. In the meantime we can stop pretending that we’re all terrified. We’re fine.