Terrorism

TIME dutifully reports that:

… as one Kabul cleric Mohammed Omar told newsmen, “The burning of these bodies is an offense against Muslims everywhere. Bodies are burned only in Hell.”

I know just what he has in mind.

At Mass yesterday the Gospel reading was Jesus’ admonition to forgive, Mt:18:21-35. The priest gave a solid enough homily on this point, with some reference to the attacks of four years ago. And he is right to say we should forgive the people who hate us and who attacked us. That does not mean, and he did not suggest, that we should not defend ourselves, or carry the war to them. We sang America as our recessional, yet another indication that the date is now solemnized as an annual patriotic memorial.

Forgiveness does not mean being naïve. It does not mean failing to recognize evil when you see it. It does mean not repaying evil with evil, but responding to evil with justice, not vengeance or hatred. President Bush is right to emphasize that we will bring our enemies to justice, or justice to them. We must prosecute our wars without rancor, without the madness that grips our enemies. Don’t take this from me, an armchair warrior, but from the real thing.

In his book On Combat Lt. Col. Dave Grossman quotes one of the Delta Force men who was engaged in the “Black Hawk Down” debacle in Somalia:

Don’t dehumanize those who disagree with us, or even hate us. Filling ourselves with hate is neither necessary to combat those who hate, nor is it productive. The professional soldier is one who is cold, dispassionate and regretful in his duty when forced to kill. … The steady trigger finger kills a lot more enemy than one that trembles with hatred. Take pride in the fact that we live in a country where we should treat Americans from all clans as Americans first and foremost; don’t stoop to the level of hating those who hate us. …

The practical tasks of destroying the people who want to destroy America is not advanced by hating them. Cool heads bring victory; steady aim puts the bullet on the mark. The moral task of transcending the people who would destroy America is not advanced by hating them, either. Our active enemies have made hating us the core of what they do and what they are. We need not and should not mirror-image this stupidity. We have much more to offer, much more to do, and fighting them does not define us. It is one distasteful task amidst many positive activities. They are simply in the way.

Removing the threat to America is a hard and dangerous and bloody task. We have gratitude and respect for those who bear the heaviest burden of doing that job — the kind of people Michael Yon writes about, for one example. As John Keegan wrote:

War is repugnant to the people of the United States; yet it is war that has made their nation and it is through their power to wage war that they dominate the world. Americans are proficient at war in the same way that they are proficient at work. It is a task, sometimes a duty. … Left to themselves, Americans build, cultivate, bridge, dam, canalize, invent, teach, manufacture, think, write, lock themselves in struggle with the eternal challenges that man has chosen to confront, and with an intensity not known elsewhere on the globe. Bidden to make war their work, American shoulder the burden with intimidating purpose. There is, as I have said, an American mystery, the nature of which I only begin to perceive. If I were obliged to define it, I would say it is the ethos – masculine, pervasive, unrelenting – of work as an end in itself. War is a form of work, and America makes war, however reluctantly, however unwillingly, in a particularly workmanlike way. I do not love war: but I love America.

I had this last year on 9/12, emphasizing that we should forget nothing, but that we should get on with it. I still think that.

God bless America.

Today is the fourth anniversary of 9/11. People occasionally ask me if I’ve “come to terms” with my anger over the taking of innocent lives.

I dunno. Let me check.

We are, right this minute, engaged in a global war. The struggle will last decades. Defeats will be documented by the world’s media while many victories will never be discussed until long after this war is over, if ever. Many of our best, our brightest, and our most noble will pay the ultimate price.

But there is one certainty. Our enemy can never defeat us as long as we have an unshakable resolve. That is both our most precious and most delicate resource. We must husband it by remembering what terrible acts were performed upon innocent people, and always consider that worse will happen if we falter for even a moment.

Today I find my thoughts turning to the only time I ever broke down and openly wept in public. I wonder what happened to those kids I met on that day, what turns their lives took, and I hope that they fared well.

But, no matter what happened, I’m sure that they did their best.

Responding to Shannon Love, Lex wrote:

If the West wants to survive, it could destroy this threat with a small amount of physical exertion. The moral and intellectual energy are what is missing. Or, missing from most of Europe, much of Britain and far too much of the United States.

I think the energy is there, but the activation threshold has not, for a large part of our population, been crossed. All it would take to cross that threshold would be another one or two big attacks a la 9/11, or several years of smaller attacks in which many people are killed and westerners become demoralized and cautious about daily life. Either way it is likely that voters would eventually insist that their leaders deal with the problem no matter what, which is essentially what happened in Israel. And either scenario is ominous for the Muslim world in general and Arab Muslims in particular.

On this last point I agree with what I take to be the positions of Wretchard and of Jim Bennett. By responding forcefully abroad to terrorists and their patron states, and by sincerely encouraging development in those states of robust new democratic political cultures, George Bush has substantially weakened our enemies. Ironically, by doing so he has also reduced domestic political pressure for a radical response to terror to such a low ebb that many Americans refuse to accept that we are at war. However, as I suggest above, further jihadist attacks could provide the political impetus for a much more brutal response on our part.

It is a mistake to assume that the proportion in our population of “Jacksonians” who favor annihilating our enemies is static. In reality, further terror attacks would probably radicalize many Americans who now consider themselves moderate accommodationists, just as the Intifada and bus bombings transformed many Israeli leftists into Sharon voters. Indeed the irrepressible prevalence in our society of speculations about nuking Mecca and the like shows how close the Jacksonian undercurrent flows to the surface of our polite discussions. So whose society is in mortal danger? I don’t think it’s ours.

UPDATE: See also this. (via Hugh Hewitt)

Victor Davis Hanson is right as usual:

We in the United States preened that we were the “honest broker.” After the Camp David accords we tried to be an intermediary to both sides, ignoring that one party had created a liberal and democratic society, while the other remained under the thrall of a tribal gang.

Billions of dollars poured into frontline states like Jordan and Egypt. Arafat himself got tens of millions, though none of it ever seemed to show up in good housing, roads, or power plants for his people. The terror continued, enhanced rather than arrested, by Western largess and Israeli concessions.

Then the Islamists declared war on the United States. A quarter century of mass murdering of Americans followed in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, East Africa, the first effort to topple the World Trade Center, and the attack on the USS Cole.

We gave billions to Jordan, the Palestinians, and the Egyptians. Afghanistan was saved from the Soviets through U.S. aid. Kuwait was restored after Saddam’s annexation, and the holocaust of Bosnians and Kosovars halted by the American Air Force. Americans welcomed thousands of Arabs to our shores and allowed hundreds of madrassas and mosques to preach zealotry, anti-Semitism, and jihad without much scrutiny.

Then came September 11 and the almost instant canonization of bin Laden.

Suddenly, the prior cheap shots at Israel under siege weren’t so cheap. It proved easy to castigate Israelis who went into Jenin, but not so when we needed to do the same in Fallujah.

It was easy to slander the Israelis’ scrutiny of Arabs in their midst, but then suddenly a few residents in our own country were found to be engaging in bomb making, taking up jihadist pilgrimages to Afghanistan, and mapping out terrorist operations.

Worth reading in its entirety.

(via Democracy for the Middle East)