9/11 a date to remember! Why?

By Donald A. Collins | 14 September 2026
Church and State

(Credit: Michael Foran / Flickr / Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic)

In a sense, 9/11 partly came as a result of the Third World giving the US payback for its incursions by our powerful military industrial complex?

I am not suggesting that we did not need to respond forcibly against Hitler and the Japanese after Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. We certainly needed to and rapidly assembled the military capacity to meet that supreme challenge.

However, for the present and future, we citizens of the US certainly should take some wisdom about the deteriorating chances for World Peace. The major powers seem anxious to consolidate power so wars are accelerating in various places. Cooperation and peace will be the only way to save us from a 6th Extinction as the quality of our air and our over consumption of the earth’s limited resources is fostered by failed leadership and an excess of human numbers.

Paul Silverstone’s brilliant article just published on this website talks about the effect of 9/11 on our civil liberties once eroded lead to authoritarianism then colonialism, profoundly important trends, accelerating international conflict?

On September 11, 2001 the twin towers in New York were attacked by Osama bin Laden’s carefully planned attack by his followers.

2977 Americans lost their lives that day and subsequently a beautiful memorial was erected on the site of the fallen towers. There was every reason to mark this horrible event which we are doing as this opinion piece is being written. The subsequent air pollution at the site just now released by New York city government prove to me extremely dangerous to those who were trying to clean up at this disastrous. Our government failed to notify people that the air around the site was not safe to work in and as a result, many breathe that air and were inflicted with serious problems.

The bravery of fireman and everyone caught in this tragedy deserve our gratitude and of course, subsequently we found the leader, Osama bin Laden, and killed him.

“Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden[b] (10 March 1957 – 2 May 2011) was the founder and first general emir of al-Qaeda from 1988 until his killing in 2011. A Salafi jihadist, bin Laden worked to establish a pan-Islamist caliphate by using al-Qaeda to organize and fund jihadist militants and terrorists worldwide. Al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001 directly killed 2,977 victims, and resulted in the global war on terror.”

You can read Osama’s total history here.

Is it appropriate to reflect on the beginnings of the Jewish holidays Rosh Hashanah, with hopes for the new year facing the fact that racism of all kinds still is rampant in America. That holiday starts this weekend to celebrate with loved ones the time ahead.

Now let’s circle back to my first sentence. The United States as the world‘s most powerful nation (certainly at the time of 911) has quite a history of inflicting its military presence on a myriad of people. Yes, Trump destroyed USAID which gave us enormous favorable presence to the entire world at very little cost financially to us.

Look at the activities beginning with the Vietnam war and going through a whole series of earlier military actions, we have taken around the world in the pursuit of containing power. Anyone who has been to Vietnam as I have twice could make a statement that is rather ironic, which is that after we made these attacks on Third World countries those countries often seem to revive themselves and benefit subsequently from our attacks.

I personally had an example of that when I visited in Vietnam and walked unescorted all over the Hanoi area where I was an American not attacked by its citizens because The US had lost the war for the first time in international incursions after World War Two.

And perhaps the only success in these military incursions occurred in Korea. There wasn’t a conclusion of that war only an armistice, but the southern part of Korea, its economy and its democracy that only survived has proven to be a great success. Of course, the dangerous North Korea with nuclear weapons still threatens the world.

Of course, when we entered that war President, Harry Truman was able to get many others to cooperate which was not done subsequently. Trump’s Iran War is perhaps our most stupid foreign adventure of all.

So, it is worthy at this time to mourn America’s brave dead but also understand that we have inflicted our presence widely ever since the Monroe doctrine and the pain that we’ve inflicted could in many cases lead to payback.

We are currently in a payback position as we face the Iranians, as terrible as that country is governed, and find that we are now in a place that we can’t easily solve. Recall what Nixon did in Cambodia. How many people did Nixon kill in Cambodia in1973? Between 5000 and 150,000!

I would harken back to the farewell address in January 1961 given by retiring President Eisenhower when he said we must be aware of the Military Industrial Complex.

Why did Eisenhower warn about the military industrial complex?

Read about his waring here.

Were we testing those weapons we had or were we also trying to be sure that the assets the countries we invaded were not taken over by somebody else?

Yes, mourn 911 but also think clearly about how history evolves beginning perhaps with the fact that when Europeans landed in North America, we began to eviscerate the Indian tribes that has been here for thousands of years. Trump now sees us reviving so-called Manifest Destiny with US takeovers of Greenland and Canada.

Can we recover moral respectably? Read Vanderbilt University’s history professor John Meacham new book entitled “The soul of America: the battle forearm better angels”.

His book review.

With the growing possibility that we could face extinction from nuclear weapons—it would take just one to start us there–we need to get quickly together as a world in our pursuit of peace and equity which is clearly not moving in that direction at this time.

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Los Angeles, CA, has spent over 60 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of 17 books: “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?”, “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”, “Can Our U.S. Survive 8 Plus Billion of Us”, “Economic Growth: A Cancer on all Earthly Life”, “On the Precipice of Political Disaster in 2024”, “Democracy at Red State Risk”, “Does Trump Go to Jail or to The Oval Office?”, “Trump: Pardon or Punish?: The Nixon Precedence Was Not A Trump Coup Denied!”, “Common Sense: When will Trump be Impeached, Indicted, and Exited?”, “Trump–unrestrained dangerous liar!”, “Our Ethnic Mix May Save Us!” and “Trump will be gone before November 3, 2026!”.

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