9/12

Monday, September 12, 2011  Amid all of the commentary that has come out over the past week or so about remembering the 9/11 attacks, I thought I'd write about 9/12. Why write about 9/12? Because, while Americans have tended to remember 9/11 in terms of American victimization and American loss, a lot of the rest of the world remembers 9/11 for what came later. Yes, we lost 3,000 people in an unspeakable act of violence. But, in our grief, we allowed our military to be used to attack and occupy a country that had nothing to do with the attacks. Estimates at Iraqi casualties stemming from our invasion range between the low hundreds of thousands to over one million. Americans remembered 9/11 at football games and elsewhere this weekend, but how selective was this memory?