by J.B. Shurk, American Thinker:
As Peter Schweizer noted in a short report for the Hoover Institution on Christmas Day 2000, twenty-five years ago the United States was “spending less on defense as a percentage of GNP than anytime since the Great Depression.” That all changed nine months later when the so-called “peace dividend” from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War was reinvested in a “Global War on Terrorism.”
Eight trillion dollars later, and what do Americans have to show for their sacrifices in blood and treasure? The Taliban is in control of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda is in control of Syria, an apologist for Islamic jihad is about to become mayor of New York City, and a pro-Hamas contingent of lawmakers wields too much power in Congress.
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In an article that resembles an obituary for U.S. foreign policy during the twenty-first century, writer Daniel McAdams dryly observes in the headline, “‘Global War on Terror’ Is Over. Terror Won.” That’s quite the gut punch for everyone who lived through 9/11 and its aftermath. Yet it’s hardly inaccurate.
A quarter-century after Islamic terrorists murdered three thousand Americans, politicians are more concerned about “Islamophobia” in the United States than providing adequate care for veterans who confronted Islamic barbarity head-on. The hurt feelings of those who risked nothing to defend the homeland matter more than the damaged bodies and minds of those who risked everything.
The significance of 9/11 has been so watered-down that Congresswoman Ilhan Omar remembers it only as a day when “some people did something.” For the victims we lost, their families, members of the military who fought and died on the global battlefield, and the families of those servicemembers who never saw their loved ones again, that “something” was — by far — the most consequential event in their lives. Now it’s just an opportunity for foreigners who become members of Congress to guilt-trip white people for their imaginary “privilege.”
After 9/11, everybody insisted that we left our guard down and somehow brought the tragedy upon ourselves. If we had only continued spending on defense at the same high levels that we had been spending since WWII, then we could have prevented the worst attack on American soil since the Japanese Empire bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. That was the supposed lesson. It didn’t matter that we were still spending more than every other country in the world; as soon as we cut back on Cold War military spending, we suffered another surprise attack. We were vulnerable, everyone agreed, unless we rededicated tax dollars toward huge military budgets.
Everybody in the defense sector got big buckets of money after that. Weapons manufacturers, research and development firms, intelligence think tanks, and foreign policy consultants made out like bandits. The FBI got new domestic surveillance powers. The Department of Homeland Security and Transportation Security Administration came into existence. The CIA positioned itself once again as the unofficial quarterback of the U.S. government. Unelected bureaucrats, in other words, became much more powerful than they were before 9/11, and the defense industry started cashing much bigger checks. All the institutions that experienced a diminishment of clout and prestige after the Cold War found their clout and prestige supercharged in the post-9/11 world. That’s a pretty sobering reminder that some people always benefit from tragedy.
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