Those of us who are old enough to remember 9/11, especially as adults, doubtless recall the palpable rage that came with learning about such a savage, unprovoked, devastating attack on our own homeland. We all remember where we were when we first saw and processed the brutal images of planes hitting the towers, smoke and debris everywhere, fellow citizens jumping to certain death to avoid the fiery, more painful one facing them head-on, and buildings collapsing, burying thousands beneath mountains of rubble. After the initial shock and sympathy for the victims, we all wanted revenge, and lots of it.
I remember tearing up and getting chill bumps watching then-President George Bush’s historic bullhorn speech and even listening to country singer Toby Keith singing about putting a “boot in [their] ass[es].” Hell yeah they were gonna hear from us, and they deserved all the death and destruction they were about to receive, and then some.
I didn’t know a lot about the nuances of Middle East policy or the Arab / Israeli conflict, but I did know that we had to respond and respond hard or it seemed logical to assume such attacks would happen again and again. Of course, like many of us back then I also didn’t have a refined notion of the broad, long-term costs of forever wars. We hadn’t experienced one of those yet in my lifetime, so the warning, even from politicians I respected like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, was theoretical at best.
Even Paul, then a congressman from Texas, voted with 419 other members of the House in 2001 to authorize military force against the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, who were presumed to be hiding Osama bin Laden. It was supposed to be a quick war, as so many leaders tend to promise at the beginning of such conflicts. In and out, and justice served. Sadly, we know how things turned out. More than two decades later, after a futile, expensive war and a disastrous exit, we accomplished nothing real or lasting.
The next year, in 2002, Paul joined 126 Democrats and 5 other Republicans to vote against invading Iraq. In hindsight, it was the beginning of Paul’s rise in libertarian-oriented presidential politics and the beginning of the end of Bush’s legacy as president of the United States. Bush went on to wade into the Iraq quagmire, and his fruitless, unending quest for the “weapons of mass destruction” that never existed cost Republicans both the House and the Senate in 2006 and the presidency in a landslide two years after that. As Donald Trump has pointed out, if only we had at least taken the oil.
Paul obviously never condoned a forever war with his reluctant pro-Afghan invasion vote. In fact, in 2011, a decade later and less than halfway through the long slog, he said these prescient words:
"The question we're facing today is should we leave Afghanistan? I think the answer is very clear and it's not complicated, that of course we should. As soon as we can. This suggests that we can leave by the end of the year. If we don't, we'll be there for another decade would be my prediction … The large majority of the American people now say it's time to get out of Afghanistan. It's a fruitless venture, too much has been lost, the chance of winning, since we don't even know what we're going to win, doesn't exist."
A little more than a week ago, Israel faced its own 9/11 moment when more than a thousand Hamas militants invaded their land and brutally slaughtered hundreds of innocent civilians, many in their own homes. The understandable reaction has been towards retribution. Certainly, within the confines of just war, Israel has the full right to do what it needs to do in Gaza, and they should have our unwavering support.
But dealing with Gaza is one thing, toying with a far wider, potentially world war is quite another. Predictably, perpetual neocon war hawk Lindsey Graham seems to prefer the latter, loudly and proudly calling for air strikes on Iran whether or not there is direct evidence that country had anything to do with the Hamas attack.
Enter Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, son of Ron Paul, who issued his own warning against allowing this to turn into a wider war during a Fox News appearance last week. Speaking with “Jesse Watters Primetime” host Jesse Watters, Paul noted the “immediate reaction” after such an event to want to “get everybody who is responsible,” but cautioned that a similar public sentiment led to a forever war with Iraq two decades ago.
Paul went on to point out the futility of “bomb[ing] knowledge” given the fact that enriched uranium can be easily hidden. “Now I’m not saying you look the other way,” Paul said. “Something will have to be done, but we have to be careful of the ‘bomb em now, bomb em everywhere, bomb em all the time’ [mentality]. And our founding fathers were conscious of that. They said we need to vote on these things. No one person, no president, no one person gets to decide when war happens, and while war is a means of retribution, it isn’t always pretty and it doesn't always get exactly what we intend as well.”
A key part of the many lessons of 9/11 is remembering how easy it is to let emotion trigger you into supporting a wider war that has no discernable objective or end game.
Which leads me to the ultimate question, motive. Why would Hamas do something like this when they knew full well what the response would be? Could at least part of it be to try to bait the West into a much wider war that they hope they'll be on the winning side of in the end? Could the Islamic extremists want the exact same events to unfold that the Pauls have been warning us against for decades?
For all our sakes, the US and Israel would be wise to both listen to people like Rand Paul and refrain from taking Hamas’ bait.