ON Saturday, the United States will mark the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that claimed 2,977 innocent lives.
Instead of answering the unanswered questions of the victims' loved ones — they still remain unanswered today — the US and its Western allies went on a "war on terror". As it turned out, the US was leading the West on a "war of terror".
Washington and London went ballistic with "America was under attack". So did European capitals. The usual-suspect media were going "copy that". CNN was one, says David Hearst, formerly a journalist with The Guardian and now the co-founder of the Middle East Eye, a regional news portal.
America is at war with a new enemy with a global reach, it broke the news to Americans still in shock. Then US president George W. Bush asked the Congress for a blank cheque for his "war on terror".
But there were sane voices, too, though they were like a few in a crowd of millions. One such was Barbara Lee, the lone congresswoman, says Hearst in his op-ed, "9/11 attacks: Why the 'war on terror' will not end".
Lee's message to America was this: "Let's just pause, just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control."
But neither America nor the Congress was in the mood to listen to Lee. In the event, the House of Representatives voted 140 to 1 to approve the Authorisation for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) on Sept 18, 2001.
Lee's was the only "no" vote. What Lee feared came true: the so-called war on terror spiralled out of control. Here is why.
One, America and its Western allies weren't after the 19 wayward murderers who committed the despicable acts. Nor the men who may have sent them there. Their target was wider.
Bush's "you-are-with-us-or-against-us" was a window into his mind. The then British prime minister Tony Blair's Western values speeches that he began delivering post-9/11 were narratives designed to deliver a similar message.
The Bush-Blair's script was: dress like us, eat like us and be like us. No stretch of the imagination allows such a reading of the 2001 AUMF.
The Congress only authorised the president to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against those who "committed or aided" the 19 men who carried out the 9/11 attacks.
If US President Joe Biden is right, these men have been killed and their organisations dismantled. To keep the 2001 AUMF in the statute book is to want war not peace. Congress must know this.
American airstrikes since 9/11 have killed more than 48,000 civilians, says Airwars, a monitoring group based in the United Kingdom in a publication marking the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. And that is just airstrikes.
All in all, a million human lives have been lost because of the AUMF that Lee tried to stop getting passed. The 140 congressmen must take responsibility for the million killed in the 20-year war of terror.
Two, as Hearst points out, no one responsible for all the deaths and injuries has been held accountable. Not Bush, Blair, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell or Mike Pompeo.
To let them strut the Earth freely is to license them to "unpack democracy from the back of a Chinook", as one American general boasted.