“I remember the sense of surrealism that accompanied” the events of September 11, 2001, said retired Air Force officer Karen Kwiatkowski. “It’s an emotional day and I have very personal memories of it.”
Now a Shenandoah County farmer and a candidate for the 2012 nomination for the U.S. House of Representatives in Virginia’s Sixth Congressional District, Kwiatkowski was at the Buena Vista Labor Day parade to meet voters. That is where she answered questions from the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about 9/11 and the war on terror that followed it.
Then a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, Kwiatkowski was working at the Pentagon when the terrorist attacks of September 2001 took place.
“It’s strange,” she said, “but I remember the beautiful weather that we had” that day in Arlington.
‘Trying to make sense’
Like others who shared their memories of that day (Congressman Bob Goodlatte and U.S. Senate candidate Jamie Radtke), Kwiatkowski and her colleagues watched the events unfold on television and “saw what was happening in New York. Then our building was hit. We looked out our windows and saw fire.”
What followed, she recalled, was “just this panic, then it calmed, and then we walked out[side],” where the group she was with was “herded around to the side, where we could see the gaping hole” and watch the response of the firefighters.
There they were, she remembered, “all of us together, thousands and thousands of people standing there, trying to come to terms [with it], trying to make sense of what was happening. It was really impossible to do.”
Reflecting on whether international terrorism poses the same kind of existential threat to the United States as the Soviet Union did, Kwiatkowski replied with an unequivocal no.
‘Act of criminals’
The word “existential,” she noted, “means life or death, the end of things.”
Terrorism, she explained, “is really an act of criminals, of course. We’ve dealt with crimes and acts of criminals for decades and centuries. It’s a normal thing.”
By contrast, the “Soviet Union, when we think back to the Cold War -- and half of my 20-year career in the military was during the Cold War -- that was the threat of a mutual nuclear holocaust. We had our nukes pointed at them, ready to go. They had their nukes pointed at us, ready to go.”
9/11: ‘ugly example’
The outcome of the Cold War, she said, was “a wonderful thing” that nuclear annihilation “never came to be” but that would have been “an existential threat.”
As Kwiatkowski sees it, “terrorism is the response of people who feel that they have no voice in any other peaceful means. They have no political voice, they have anger, and, of course, this country is in places doing things that cause people to become angry. Many of them feel powerless and that powerlessness comes through in terrorism. Certainly 9/11 was a really ugly example of that kind of thing.”
Karen Kwiatkowski is seeking to unseat ten-term incumbent GOP Representative Bob Goodlatte in next year’s Sixth District nomination contest.
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