Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

I am writing in response to a recent editorial in the DAILY EGYPTIAN by Ana Velitchkova, entitled "The Legacy of Sept. 11". In her column, Velitchkova points out many of the flaws, lies and exaggerations of the Bush Administration, but her opening paragraphs especially made me ashamed to be a liberal. Velitchkova describes 9/11/01 as a "macabre commemoration" of the evils of the Pentagon, the organizer of "more than 200 interventions, which took the life of more than 100,000 American soldiers, 30 to 40 percent of whom were minorities, and a countless number of other victims." With broad strokes, Velitchkova assumes every intervention ever planned by the Pentagon ˘ including the humanitarian ones ˘ has been an atrocity, and implies that minorities in the military were pawns of racist generals rather than soldiers who died doing jobs they volunteered for. Velitchkova then goes on to compare the product of the four crashed planes to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but does so in a way that implies the United States was to blame for everything mentioned. It should be clarified that the planes didn≠t "crash," in the sense of mechanical troubles or simply running out of gas. They "were crashed," i.e. deliberately. In a long column lamenting the evils of the Bush Administration, Velitchkova had barely a single bad word to say about the guys who actually chopped off fingers and crashed the planes in the first place. As for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, any decent person considers such indiscriminate death and destruction a terrible tragedy. I≠ve even heard some say dropping the bombs was an unnecessary act of terrorism, while others (such as Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur and Winston Churchill) wrote of their strong misgivings about it. But others, citing the samurai doctrine of "death before dishonor", have pointed out that even after the bombs were dropped, Japanese generals voted not to surrender and had to be forced to do so by Emperor Hirohito. Velitchkova's comparison of 9/11 to Hiroshima and Nagasaki is descriptive and partially valid, but it≠s also dangerous in that it blurs the complexity of these issues. For example, I doubt senior members of al Qaeda were racking their brains (and their souls) before the Twin Towers were decimated, trying to decide if this action was really necessary in order to force an unconditional surrender and save soldiers≠ lives. Also, I've read that after "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima, Robert Lewis (co-pilot of the Enola Gay) wrote in his journal, "My God, what have we done?" Since the terrorists on 9/11 killed themselves in the process, it's impossible to know if they'd have asked themselves the same thing... but based on their track record, I doubt it. Like Velitchkova, I frequently cringe whenever I see pseudo-religious quasi-patriotic politicians doing what they do best, which is politicizing 9/11. But I can≠t be alone in thinking it's inappropriate to use the anniversary of that sad day as a springboard for bashing the United States en masse. To say nothing of the contradiction in condemning the Pentagon but lamenting the death of American soldiers, when many in the Pentagon are soldiers themselves.

Michael Meyerhofer Graduate Student, creative writing English Department

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