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As the faces of thirteen American soldiers killed in Afghanistan looked out at me a few days ago from the front page of the New York Times, and as the war in that country comes to its “official” end, whatever that means exactly, I am reminded of the truth that we live in a world of killers. Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden–commanders in chief of a populace that wanted this war as revenge for the killings of 9/11. Killers here. Killers there. Killers everywhere. In a few weeks we will once again memorialize the wrong day as the most important in this century. We memorialize September 11th, 2001, not September 14th, 2001. In so doing we perpetuate the cycle of violence rather than slow it down. On September 11th, 2001 America was attacked, as everyone knows. But it is the ramifications of what happened three days later that every child should be taught. Because that is when President Bush went to Ground Zero to say: “We can hear you, we can hear you. And soon the people who knocked these buildings down will hear you too.” Soon, Mr Bush was saying, we will do our own killing. Soon we will drop our bombs. Soon, said this avowedly Christian President, we will again practice a foreign policy of an eye for an eye. What an incredible missed opportunity. 9/11 was the first such event all mankind viewed together. For the first time a world of killers watched a killing in real time. While most of us in the West grieved and far too many in the East cheered, history delivered the world what every teacher and any preacher needs: a common text. And as the sole superpower at that time America alone was in a position to choose the lesson, pick the sermon. Rather than teach revenge we might have ministered to the value of restraint. Imagine how much prouder–and richer–we would be today had President Bush said: “I can hear you, I can hear you. And soon the people who knocked these buildings down will hear that America is strong and free because it is a country of laws, not a cult of vengeance. We will join the United Nations in prosecuting the perpetrators of this crime and commit to carpet bombing our enemies with books and water and generators. We will establish a new world order based on the rights of each of us to live rather than to kill. We will turn the other cheek.” Imagine in practical terms of blood and money and political stability how much better off we would be today had we taken this approach. Imagine how many more people on all sides would be alive, maybe even those thirteen soldiers killed at the Kabul Airport. Because Mr. Bush said it would take one hundred years to know if he did the right thing in Iraq. Well, twenty years on what’s the verdict? Does anyone feel safer at the airport now? If a bomb goes off in D.C. or NYC or LA, will the world sympathize with us as it did on 9/11? Is the Middle-East more stable? Are there no dots to connect between insisting our unilateral bombs were righteous and how Russia and China now pursue their own national interest without fear of any international reprisal? Have we any moral suasion left? Did our Afghanistan adventure turn to anything other than a disaster? Twenty years on, is our country stronger in its roots or at its tips in any way? Or would sifting through the body parts of those thirteen soldiers–all but one of them kids–help you remember that when that guy in the desert said, “Blessed are the peacemakers” he also meant: Cursed are the war makers. Nothing about restraint over vengeance as a plan in 2001 is hindsight. Osama Bin-Laden made it clear he wanted to drag us into a long, endless war. Our enemy sent us his playbook. We followed it. And nothing about not killing rather than killing is hippy-dippy or soft or would not have served our most selfish national interest. The past few decades have confirmed just the opposite and are a reminder of what Martin Luther King Jr., meant when he said, “Jesus is not an impractical idealist; he is the practical realist.” Many of my friends, and intellectual heroes like Christopher Hitchens too, would say we have real enemies. Too often liberals in The West act as if we caused 9/11 or the Taliban are just one warm and fuzzy removed from joining the Elks club. I am not a pacifist nor wistful about the psychopath Saddam Hussein was. I don;t mind killing people who make rape an ideology. What’s more, a century of foreign policy based on giving rather than killing will not vanquish most or maybe even any of our enemies. A world of killers does not become a peaceful global village overnight. But in some tomorrow we have to start doing the right thing rather than the wrong one. To respond to stupidity, backwardness, and the genocidal belief God is on one’s side with the stupid, the backward, and the vengeful belief God is on our side is no way to move towards that peaceful village, let alone stay a superpower. Our withdrawal from Afghanistan and the past two decades of American decline since 9/11 have made this explicit . . . again. As pathetic as it is to watch FOX try and blame all of Afghanistan on Biden’s bungled withdrawal, sadder still is how all of us forget that in a world of killers we must not teach what it means when someone kills us, but how our killing lays us low. Because it turns out our most selfish interests are served by generosity, God is not on anyone’s side, and doing the right thing is good for everyone. September 14th, 2001 offered America history’s best chance to teach a new lesson about borders and boundaries, attack and defense, war and peace, right and wrong. We blew it. The irony for all the Christians out there is that Mr. Bush might have said: “The text for how to handle this crisis is on my desk.” By following Jesus rather than Halliburton he would presided over the start of a century of American ascendance as well as been a beacon for his faith. How much a better advert for church he might have been than the Falwells, the papal rapists or those ministers who now preach prayer, not a vaccine, is what the world needs? The irony is that in a connected age, when everyone can watch buildings come down or a grifter lie in real time, the spotlight of global power does not depend on truth or even integrity, just the right kind of lie. Which is to say that only someone as stupid as Mr. Trump could have missed the golden opportunity handed to him by the pandemic. Just as Mr, Bush had an opportunity to make the world more American and less violent and, in so doing, make himself and his religion more agreeable, Mr. Trump had the opportunity to ensure himself reelection with a few simple words: I will recruit former Presidents Obama and Bush to be “logistic czars” in charge of producing tests and PPE for every street corner . . . I have corralled the governors into teams composed of both red states and blue states as a show of national unity . . . When it comes to fighting COVID there is no Republican, no Democrat, just Americans working together . . . Mr Trump only had to mouth these words with half as much gusto as he said, “I alone can fix it” to win forty states at least and no one would have been required to defecate in the capitol or kill police officers there just to prove their patriotism. Perhaps, too, fewer than 600,000 people be dead because of his stupidity, backwardness, and ability to fool people that God is on his side.