Over the last weekend we paused, as did much of the nation, to reflect on the decade since September 11, 2001. There were many heroes on that day. There have been many since - and many sacrifices.
In the flood of opinions that flowed through our information portals during the commemorative events of the weekend, we noticed one opinion in particular. The commentator compared the events of 2001 to the beginning days of World War I, when the peoples of the western world lost their innocence.
We agree in principle, but only as far as our younger generation can now question whether they will be better off than their parents. There is indeed a loss of innocence in realizing that the affluence which Americans have enjoyed for two generations is now in jeopardy, but there is still a great deal of innocence to be found, and its first cousin, ignorance, is thriving. This is a danger inherent in a decade of war, when a generation comes of age during a time when conflict is the norm and enemies are lurking at the edges of every event, at every airport, in every bus terminal, train and subway station.
At the Flight 93 Memorial, former president George W. Bush said, “One of the lessons of 9-11 is that evil is real and so is courage.” It was a fine speech, one of his best. But the invocation of evil speaks to the limited understanding of world events which governments ask their peoples to accept at face value. It is the kind of limited understanding necessary to perpetuate a conflict that has cost at least $1.3 trillion and over six thousand American lives, not to mention the lives of over one hundred thousand civilians. One wonders how much evil was eliminated through the deaths of all those men, women and children.
We all understand the heroism and the sacrifice that grows out of the finest qualities of our people and our way of life. Our faith, our democratic principles, the stability of our republic, our free market economy and the freedoms which we enjoy are all worth defending. We understand that we have enemies bent on our destruction and willing to die in any effort to harm us. We need to understand how those enemies were created. If we do not gain this understanding, then the sacrifices we have made of democracy and our republic to the ever growing executive branch, the sacrifices we have made of the free market to an increasingly intrusive government and the sacrifices we have made of personal freedoms to the security state – will continue until there is nothing left that can be sacrificed.
We can begin to expand our understanding of the current predicament with the knowledge that the United States maintains hundreds of military bases around the world. The DOD 2010 Base Structure Report lists 662 foreign sites in 38 countries. The reasons for these bases are varied and the history is detailed, but there are common themes. Maintaining national security is, in large part, an effort to maintain supply lines of natural resources and to safeguard economic zones, and this is where our personal ownership of the problem comes into play. The unfortunate fact is that our current energy affluence – our way of life centered on the automobile and marked by waste – is dependent on extracting oil from parts of the world where religion and social structure generate volatility.
If there was no oil in the Middle East it is highly unlikely that our presence there would be so immense. Some strategic thinkers have recognized this and the awareness of our need to end our dependence on foreign energy has even appeared from time to time on the political stage. A Middle East without an imperial American presence would bring a peace dividend that would go a long way towards solving our financial problems. It would reduce the number of our enemies which exist solely because foreign troops are stationed on their soil.
Do we have an option to abandon oil from the Middle East? Not really. Not yet. As a people, we have been very reluctant to conserve, to save and to consider a lifestyle that does not include the frigid in the summer, balmy in the winter, maximum horsepower full-speed-ahead way of life of previous generations. As a government we have stifled innovation with intrusiveness and interference in the free market and we have strangled the economy with a ridiculous tax code and an insane monetary policy which will grow nothing but debt and the size of government.
Have we made progress in the last decade? Some. Alternative energy sources are beginning to take a bite out of our dependence on fossil fuels. Energy from domestic sources has steadily increased. Have we learned to conserve? Not really. In fact, any savings that we have gained is due more to our economic slowdown than to any voluntary efforts. We are approaching a nexus. Before this point, we can proactively take steps to become leaner, more efficient, more localized. Past this point and we will react to each new crisis as best we can.
