The anniversary of the 9/11 attacks always calls forth a great deal of heart-wrenching recollections. I personally find it just too hard to read the many stories of the victims and their families that always get published in the days leading up to the date.  The obligation to “never forget” apparently implies, for many, an obligation to immerse oneself in the sadness and the horror of that day. I understand that, but I can’t quite go with that flow myself.

I was closer than most Americans to the events of 9/11.  My employer, the Port Authority of NY and New Jersey, had been the owner and operator of the World Trade Center.  My office was on the 88^th floor of 1 WTC.  (The plane hit at the 93^rd.) I was lucky—I had just gotten off the subway, on my way to work, when my building was struck—but I had friends and colleagues who died that day.  Others, who got down and out in time, were badly traumatized.

But this day of remembrance and grieving always holds an ambivalence for me. The anger and outrage at the perpetrators of the atrocity is entirely justified, but I can’t help seeing it as also myopic and one-sided.  Myopic because it has never been acceptable to honestly and realistically deal with the question: “Why did they attack us?” Part of the answer of course has to do with the hateful religious fanaticism of the attackers. But most of the discussions in the media are content to leave it at that. Any suggestion that maybe the perpetrators had some reasonable motivations is unthinkable, because it could be read as a justification or apologia for an outrageous act.  So, Susan Sontag was excoriated for her clearly correct observation that the attack was a consequence of specific American policies.  Policies that deserved critical scrutiny but didn’t get it.

With characteristic vacuity George W. Bush claimed that Al Qaeda attacked us because they hated our freedom.  But Bin Laden was pretty clear about why he attacked the US.  (if it was just about freedom, he said, we could have attacked Sweden.) Apart from a lot of drivel about Western decadence and the unique validity of Islam, Bin Laden cited the US stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia, a violation of a sacrosanct land for Muslims; US support for Israel; and the US-controlled UN sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in the 1990s in the hope of toppling Saddam Hussein.  But it is hard to find in our mainstream media, even today, so much as a suggestion that 9/11 was a price we paid for these policies. Bin laden sarcastically contrasted the outrage over 3,000 dead Americans with the indifference to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed by our sanctions, and he was right to do so.  (He did exaggerate the Iraqi death toll, claiming 1.5 million children. In fact, it was “only” about 500-600,000, not all of them children.) This massive atrocity, committed largely under the auspices of a Democratic administration in Washington, remains unacknowledged in our public discourse.  (If you believe the official line that it was all Saddam Hussein’s fault, then you should read Mary Gordon’s excellent Invisible War, or at least read my review of it.)

My own instant emotional reaction, on learning the names of some of my colleagues who had perished, was anger, not only at the attackers, but at my own government.  These people died because of our government’s past and current unwavering support for Israel. An oversimplification, of course, but with a large measure of truth.  But, needless to say, 9/11 did not, has never, prompted second thoughts about US policy toward Israel/Palestine. What ambitious American politician would openly state the obvious fact that our partisanship for Israel increases our vulnerability to terrorism?

I said that I can’t help viewing our grieving 9/11 remembrances as one-sided as well as myopic.  One-sided because there is no remotely comparable appreciation of the suffering and deaths caused by American foreign policy before and after 9/11. The moving portraits of 9/11 victims and their grieving families have no counterparts in portraits of families victimized by US drone and conventional air strikes in the War on Terror, or of Iraqi children slowly dying of malnutrition and disease attributable to US sanctions. This of course is understandable: we naturally empathize more with the suffering of our fellow-citizens, and anyway the deaths of people in far-away lands just don’t get the same personalized coverage in the media.  But it does seem unfair.

I could close with the hope that 9/11 could someday become an occasion for a broader and more thoughtful set of reflections than is typically the case.  But that would be too much to hope for wouldn’t it?  Which is why I expect that 9/11 for me will continue to be a day of ambivalent anger and frustration as well as sorrowful remembrance.