Terrorism

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)

At NRO’s Corner K. J. Lopez has a “quickie” transcript of Howard’s press conference. He observes that Bin Laden justified the Bali bombing & murder of Sergio de Mello in Iraq by both Australia’s and de Mello’s roles in East Timor. Howard begins:

Can I just say very directly, Paul, on the issue of the policies of my government and indeed the policies of the British and American governments on Iraq, that the first point of reference is that once a country allows its foreign policy to be determined by terrorism, it’s given the game away, to use the vernacular. And no Australian government that I lead will ever have policies determined by terrorism or terrorist threats, and no self-respecting government of any political stripe in Australia would allow that to happen.

Howards words are inspiring; the reporter’s questions are not. Senators aren’t the only ones with “dumbass” questions. Howard’s response has the context of the real world (where Bin Laden’s fatwas are actually read & his words, say about East Timor, actually register). Clearly, Howard, like Hatch, can say: “But I do know dumbass questions when I see dumbass questions.” Still, he dignifies them with an answer that is neither hasty nor nasty if loaded with history he knows only too well. Thanks Instapundit for both, who also links to The Anchoress’ visual chronology of steps in “Bush’s War.”

Max Boot ponders the parallels between the Blitz and the Bombing:

The London bombings have occasioned many comparisons with the 1940 Blitz. This is usually cited as evidence of British fortitude — the attitude exemplified by cockneys in the heavily bombed East End who told Winston Churchill, “We can take it, but give it ’em back.” That is indeed the dominant British (and American) attitude, then and now, but it is important not to ignore a streak of timidity there (and here) that may get stronger in the years ahead and that was present even when civilization faced an existential threat from Nazism.

The last sentence segues into a litany of appeasement stances. I imagine that in their day these appeals against involvement in the war were far louder than history has allowed their echoes to be. Take one delicious morsel of an example:

Even in January 1942, when German armies were at the gates of Moscow, George Orwell wrote in Partisan Review that “the greater part of the very young intelligentsia are anti-war … don’t believe in any ‘defense of democracy,’ are inclined to prefer Germany to Britain, and don’t feel the horror of Fascism that we who are somewhat older feel.”

As if to illustrate Orwell’s point, a pacifist poet named D.S. Savage wrote a reply in which he explained why he “would never fight and kill for such a phantasm” as “Britain’s ‘democracy.’ ” Savage saw no difference between Britain and its enemies because under the demands of war both were imposing totalitarianism: “Germans call it National Socialism. We call it democracy. The result is the same.”

Savage naively wondered, “Who is to say that a British victory will be less disastrous than a German one?” Savage thought the real problem was that Britain had lost “her meaning, her soul,” but “the unloading of a billion tons of bombs on Germany won’t help this forward an inch.” “Personally,” he added, with hilarious understatement, “I do not care for Hitler.” But he thought the way to resist Hitler was by not resisting him: “Whereas the rest of the nation is content with calling down obloquy on Hitler’s head, we regard this as superficial. Hitler requires, not condemnation, but understanding.”

Remind you of anything? No wonder they’ve been in such a frenzy to portray Rove as some sort of criminal mastermind — with the usual lack of success.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit)

[Cross-posted at Between Worlds]