If you happened to walk out of Morgan Hall last Monday, you may have noticed the yellow chalk outside of the main entrance reading “Cheney did 9/11.” The 16 years that have elapsed since 9/11 have made it pretty clear that Cheney did not, in fact, do 9/11. As time has passed, the events of 9/11 and the years that followed it have come into greater focus and allowed us to better understand what happened.
However, the validity of 9/11 conspiracy theories is not the only thing that has come into focus. With the last 16 years behind us, we can now see the folly and hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and the awful humanitarian toll that it has inflicted.
The simple truth is that Cheney did not do 9/11, but he, the Bush administration and every American president since have done much, much worse. The 9/11 terror attacks claimed nearly 3,000 innocent American lives, constituting a tragic loss of life that should not be understated.
However, according to Brown University’s Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs, approximately 165,000 Iraqi civilians died due to the War in Iraq from 2003 to 2015. That means that, numerically speaking, the War in Iraq inflicted over 4.5 9/11’s per year on the Iraqi people during that 12 year period. In addition to this staggering loss of life, the U.S. drone program has provided a constant source of terror for the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and, more recently, Syria. Its invisible threat is a constant shadow over the everyday lives of civilians in those countries.
The implications of U.S. military action in the Middle East go well beyond the civilian death toll and expose the selfishness of American politics. The self-proclaimed “War on Terror” fashions itself as a fight to protect American safety and freedom at home. Its very name makes the war seem an unavoidable conflict by framing the enemy not as other human beings but terror itself.
However, even if the war in Iraq was motivated by the protection of Americans, does the cost of innocent Iraqi lives justify the protection of our own people? Using the 165,000 civilian death toll from the Watson Institute (which does not account for civilians killed elsewhere in the Middle East or since 2015), 55 Iraqi civilians have died due to the war on terror for every one American civilian that died in 9/11. The implication of this fact, that American human lives are somehow more valuable than Iraqi human lives is jarring. It exposes the underlying selfishness and hypocrisy inherent to American patriotism and the ideals of “freedom” and “justice” that it claims as its own.
In many ways, the public and political reaction to 9/11 was uniquely American. A disturbing and tragic loss of life was met with patriotism and anger that fueled a 16 year war which has destabilized much of the Middle East. Only the American people, drunk on self-indulgent pride in their own ideals and way of life could muster such a short-sighted response. Furthermore, only the American people could continue to adhere to such ideals 16 years later despite their obvious ethical, moral and tactical failure. The simple fact of the matter is that, in the effort to eradicate terror, we have become its chief sponsor.
So, as the anniversary of 9/11 rolls around again, remember the true cost of war. Remember what your country has done under the guise of protecting your freedom. Remember that your “freedom” is not free, it can be quantified in the blood of every civilian we have killed and in the fear and anxiety of every innocent civilian who has heard the buzz of our drones overhead.
Ian Mundy, a Contributing Writer for the Voice, can be reached for comment at IMundy19@wooster.edu.