Last week Monday was the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. This terrible tragedy catapulted the US to enter the war on terror, a war that America is still fighting. While I may have been too young to remember where or what I was doing that morning, millions of Americans still recall it so vividly. I cannot even begin to fathom the pain many families went through after finding out a loved one died in those attacks.
Fifteen years later this horrible tragedy is impacting American politics through a new bill, which according to NPR, would "allow victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia for any role the country may have played in those attacks," The Saudi Arabian government is being targeted in this bill because "15 of the 19 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia", according to the 9/11 Memorial website.
This bill was passed through the Senate in May and last Friday, the bill passed through the House of Representatives. The New York Times reports that the next step for this bill will be at President Obama's desk, but the White House is not in favor of this bill. President Obama is looking to either veto it or persuade members of Congress to change their opinion because passing this bill could lead to increased tension with Saudi Arabia, one of our few allies in the Middle East.
As reported in the New York Times, "Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee,...'has concerns about the precedent it would set', fearing, as many lawmakers now do, that Americans could be sued by other nations in retaliation, or by the families of innocent people killed in drone attacks".
As much as American civilians have been killed in terror attacks, in my opinion the decisions the American government makes overseas are not always the best. Personally, I am not a fan of drone attacks because I think it's much easier for someone to hit a button from far away then facing the enemy and often all the innocent civilians. Unless the Saudi Arabian government suddenly became a totalitarian government and publicly advocated for committing terror attacks on the United States, I see no reason to blame the Saudi Arabian government for the 9/11 terror attacks. Terrorism is a tool of the weak and by inciting fear in the civilian population, their goal is to change a country's foreign policy . By targeting the Saudi Arabian government as the cause behind the deaths of hundreds of Americans on 9/11, America is playing into that fear.
