THE 9/11 ‘OVERREACTION’? NONSENSE.
Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post, September 8, 2011
The new conventional wisdom on 9/11: We have created a decade of fear. We overreacted to 9/11—al-Qaeda turned out to be a paper tiger; there never was a second attack—thereby bankrupting the country, destroying our morale and sending us into national decline.
The secretary of defense says that al-Qaeda is on the verge of strategic defeat. True. But why? Al-Qaeda did not spontaneously combust. Yet, in a decade Osama bin Laden went from the emir of radical Islam, jihadi hero after whom babies were named all over the Muslim world—to pathetic old recluse, almost incommunicado, watching shades of himself on a cheap TV in a bare room.
What turned the strong horse into the weak horse? Precisely the massive and unrelenting American war on terror, a systematic worldwide campaign carried out with increasing sophistication, efficiency and lethality—now so cheaply denigrated as an “overreaction.”
First came the Afghan campaign, once so universally supported that Democrats for years complained that President Bush was not investing enough blood and treasure there. Now, it is reduced to a talking point as one of “the two wars” that bankrupted us. Yet Afghanistan was utterly indispensable in defeating the jihadis then and now. We think of Pakistan as the terrorist sanctuary. We fail to see that Afghanistan is our sanctuary, the base from which we have freedom of action to strike Jihad Central in Pakistan and the border regions.
Iraq, too, was decisive, though not in the way we intended. We no more chose it to be the central campaign in the crushing of al-Qaeda than Eisenhower chose the Battle of the Bulge as the locus for the final destruction of the German war machine. Al-Qaeda, uninvited, came out to fight us in Iraq, and it was not just defeated but humiliated. The local population—Arab, Muslim, Sunni, under the supposed heel of the invader—joined the infidel and rose up against the jihadi in its midst. It was a singular defeat.…
In the end: 10 years, no second attack (which everyone assumed would come within months). That testifies to the other great achievement of the decade: the defensive anti-terror apparatus hastily constructed from scratch after 9/11 by President Bush, and then continued by President Obama. Continued why? Because it worked. It kept us safe—the warrantless wiretaps, the Patriot Act, extraordinary rendition, preventive detention and, yes, Guantanamo.
Perhaps, says the new conventional wisdom, but these exertions have bankrupted the country and led to our current mood of despair and decline. Rubbish. The total cost of “the two wars” is $1.3 trillion. That’s less than 1/11th of the national debt, less than one year of Obama deficit spending. During the golden Eisenhower 1950s of robust economic growth averaging 5 percent annually, defense spending was 11 percent of GDP and 60 percent of the federal budget. Today, defense spending is 5 percent of GDP and 20 percent of the budget.…
As for the Great Recession and financial collapse, you can attribute it to misguided federal policy pushing homeownership through risky subprime lending. To Fannie and Freddie. To greedy bankers, unscrupulous lenders, naive (and greedy) home buyers. To computer-enabled derivatives so complicated and interwoven as to elude control. But to the war on terror? Nonsense.
9/11 was our Pearl Harbor. This time, however, the enemy had no home address. No Tokyo. Which is why today’s war could not be wrapped up in a mere four years. It was unconventional war by an unconventional enemy embedded within a worldwide religious community. Yet in a decade, we largely disarmed and defeated it.… That is a historic achievement.
Our current difficulties and gloom are almost entirely economic in origin, the bitter fruit of misguided fiscal, regulatory and monetary policies that had nothing to do with 9/11. America’s current demoralization is not a result of the war on terror. On the contrary. The denigration of the war on terror is the result of our current demoralization, of retroactively reading today’s malaise into the real—and successful—history of our 9/11 response.
THE UNIVERSITIES’ 9/11
Charlotte Allen
Weekly Standard, September 12, 2011
America’s colleges and universities, like most of the rest of the country, will soon be commemorating the tenth anniversary of 9/11, that preternaturally sunny day in early September a decade ago when 19 al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists commandeered four U.S. commercial air-liners and crashed them deliberately, killing nearly 3,000 people.…
Unlike the commemorations in most of the rest of America, however, the academic commemorations for the most part won’t focus on, say, the 403 New York firefighters, paramedics, and police officers who died in rescue efforts at the World Trade Center towers hit by hijacked planes. Nor upon the numerous acts of courage and selflessness that marked that day, not least those of the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93, the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania, whose rallying cry “Let’s roll!” led by 32-year-old passenger Todd Beamer accompanied an effort to fight back against the terrorists. Nor upon the approximately 3,000 children who lost parents in the massacre, including dozens of babies born after their fathers perished. Least of all will there be much emphasis on what America did or should have done by way of reprisal for a brazen act of war that killed more people in the collapse of the World Trade towers alone (2,753) than perished in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 (2,402).
Instead, the campus commemorations, many of which will be spaced out for days and even weeks this fall, will focus on, well, understanding it all, in the ponderous, ambiguity-laden, complexity-generating way that seems to be the hallmark of college professors faced with grim events about which they would rather not think in terms of morality.… And the topic that seems to demand the most understanding, at least in terms of the obsessive amounts of time and resources that college professors and administrators will be devoting to it, is Islam. There will be so many campus lectures, panel discussions, teach-ins, and photo exhibits devoted to the Muslim faith, Muslim communities in America, and the real or imagined violent acts against Muslims in the wake of 9/11 (there has actually been only one revenge-slaying since that date—of a man who turned out not to be a Muslim—and the perpetrator was convicted and executed) that if you had just rocketed in from Venus, you might think that Muslims had been the chief victims, not the sole perpetrators, of the massacre that day—as well as an estimated 67 alleged terrorism incidents or attempts in the United States during the decade that followed.
For example, the University of Denver started its 9/11 commemoration activities early, in January, with lectures and noncredit courses in a series titled “9/11: Ten Years After.” The offerings in the series were titled as follows: “Retrospective Reflections on the Crisis of Religion and Politics in the Muslim World,” “Islam and Muslims in the U.S. Media,” “Lessons of Peace and Tolerance,” “The Future of Islam: Beyond Fear and Fundamentalism,” “Islam and Muslims in the News: U.S. Media Coverage Ten Years After 9/11,” and “Leadership for Peace and Tolerance: Gandhi, King, Mandela, and the Dalai Lama.” Fine, but where were the firefighters? Where was Flight 93? Where was the sense that 9/11 was an atrocity of such monstrous proportions that retribution—not to mention military action that could deter similar attacks in the future—was fully in order?…
At Harvard, a good portion of the anniversary programming is emanating from Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, which will host a “Campus-Wide Panel Discussion” on September 8. The three panelists will consist of: Jocelyne Cesari, director of Harvard’s Islam in the West program, one of whose aims is to “promote greater understanding of Islam and Muslims in the West”; Duncan Kennedy, godfather of the Critical Legal Studies movement, which holds that the American legal system is a carefully constructed edifice designed to keep wealthy white males in power and minorities in subordinate positions; and Charlie Clements, a human-rights activist on the Harvard faculty who worked as a physician during the 1980s in territories controlled by anti-U.S. guerrillas in El Salvador.…
New York University will also focus on “Islam in America” in its commemoration, with a September 13 panel discussion centering around Irshad Manji’s book Allah, Liberty and Love: The Courage to Reconcile Faith and Freedom. St. John’s University will host a lecture by Amir Hussain, a professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles…[whose] 2006 book, Oil and Water: Two Faiths: One God, asserts that Muslims who commit acts of terrorism are “caught up in cycles of violence” and lends a sympathetic ear to the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ complaints about alleged “profiling” of Muslims by U.S. government agencies.… Duke University plans to hold a day-long conference on September 15 on the “global and religious effects of 9/11,” at which news writers for Al Jazeera, the Religion News Service, and CNN will join Duke faculty members to discuss such topics as Islamic studies and the Muslim vote.…
Intellectual posturing, ideological stake-claiming, and Islamic-outreach pandering are perhaps to be expected when an academic community, politically progressive and bent double with white-privilege guilt, takes on an event as potent as 9/11. More striking is the tone of unresolved grieving that marks so many of the planned campus commemorations. Yes, mourning is appropriate.… [But] the massacre of September 11, 2001, a direct attack against American sovereignty and American citizens, has not yet been fully avenged.…
Pepperdine University, [however], will place 2,977 American flags on the lawn of its Malibu, California, campus. A relay of readers will call out the name of every single one of the dead. One of them was Pepperdine alumnus Thomas E. Burnett Jr., who perished on Flight 93. Pepperdine is calling its remembrance ceremony “Honoring the Heroes of 9/11.” Heroes. You won’t hear that word used often on many college campuses on September 11, 2011.
(Charlotte Allen is a contributing editor
to the Manhattan Institute’s Minding the Campus website.)
IGNORING THE STRENGTH OF NEW YORK’S SPIRIT
Father Raymond J. de Souza
National Post, September 8, 2011
In Dick Cheney’s new memoir, the former vice-president recalls how he went on Meet the Press the first Sunday after 9/11. The interview became famous for Cheney’s “dark side” remark to the effect that America’s response would require spending “time in the shadows of the intelligence world.”
Cheney recalls though how the broadcast ended with a point of light. The most watched episode in the history of Meet the Press closed with a tribute to the first responders.
“Tim Russert closed the interview with a remembrance of Father Mychal Judge, the chaplain of the New York City Fire Department,” Cheney writes. “Father Mike was killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11 by falling debris as he administered last rites to a first responder. Tim told of the firefighters who carried Father Mike’s body to their firehouse and who together with Father Mike’s fellow Franciscans sang the prayer of Saint Francis. ‘That,’ Tim said, ‘is the way of New York. That is the spirit of America.’ The Meet the Press crew members stood and applauded.”
It was New York’s way then, but it’s not Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s way now. He has decreed that no clergy will lead prayers and no first responders will speak at the 9/11 commemoration this Sunday.
One of the most evocative photographs of 9/11 is the first responders carrying Father Mychal’s limp and lifeless body (shown above). It immediately calls to mind the masterpieces of Christian art depicting the deposition from the Cross. Calvary visited Manhattan on 9/11, and Father Mychal was there in the person of Christ. At the official commemoration, presided over by Mayor Bloomberg, it will be as if that truly iconic image never took place.
There will be no shortage of prayers in Manhattan this Sunday. Every church, synagogue and mosque here appears to have special commemorations scheduled. But the Mayor is insistent that prayers at the official anniversary will be divisive—too many different faiths, his office claims. After all, once the Archbishop of New York is invited, how to exclude the voodoo witch doctor from East Flatbush?…
More rational people observe the strangeness of banning from the commemoration program those who actually risked their lives to offer prayers and comfort the mourning at the World Trade Center on 9/11.
Instead there will be the Mayor and no doubt other politicians. The decision reflects the idea that somehow political leaders represent the entirety of society, and therefore arrogate to themselves the exclusive right to speak for everyone. Politicians do not speak for us all, any more than politics exhausts our entire common life. A more modest Mayor, not intoxicated with the power of his office, would know that.…
Ground Zero has become a place of pilgrimage, as many other places of great horror have become places of prayer. There is a deep human desire to speak of good and evil in places given over—but not entirely—to the latter, remembering that the former was not completely extinguished.
I don’t know what Mayor Bloomberg will say on Sunday, but he certainly will not quote Samuel Johnson: “How small of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!”
What the hearts at Ground Zero endured was a not a matter of politics alone, and they were afflicted by neither laws nor kings. Their hearts endured an encounter with wickedness unleashed, and they endured by calling upon spiritual resources rather deeper than anything on offer from the local municipality. Laws and kings are of little help to the grieving heart.
On the 10th anniversary is it too much ask that those hearts not have to endure Mayor Bloomberg too?
THE WAR AMERICA FIGHTS
Caroline B. Glick
Jerusalem Post, September 9, 2011
Ten years ago, in the shadow of the crater at Ground Zero, the smoldering Pentagon and a field of honor in Pennsylvania, America found itself at war.… Ten years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the time has come to assess the progress of America’s war.…
What war has the US been fighting since September 11? President George W. Bush called the war the War on Terror. The War on Terror is a broad tactical campaign to prevent Islamic terrorists from targeting America. The War on Terror has achieved some notable successes. These include Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan which denied al-Qaida free rein in Afghanistan by overthrowing the Taliban. They also include the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and his fascist regime in Iraq, which played a role—albeit far less significant than the Taliban regime and others—in supporting Islamic terrorism against the US.
Moreover, the US has successfully prevented multiple attempts by Islamic terrorists to carry out additional mass terror attacks on US territory. This achievement, however, is at least partially a function of luck. On two occasions—the Shoe Bomber in 2001 and the Underwear Bomber in 2009—Islamic terrorists with bombs were able to board airplanes en route to the US and attempt to detonate those bombs in mid-air. The fact that their attacks were foiled by their fellow passengers is a tribute to the passengers, not to the success of the US war effort.
The US’s success in killing Osama bin Laden and other senior al-Qaida members is another clear achievement of this war. But 10 years on, the fact that Islamic terrorism directed against the US remains a salient threat to US national security shows that the War on Terror is far from won.
And this makes sense. Despite its significant successes, the War on Terror suffers from three inherent problems that make it impossible for the US to win.
The first problem is that the US has unevenly applied its tactic of denying terrorists free rein in territory of their choosing. In his historic speech before the Joint Houses of Congress on September 20, 2001, Bush pledged, “We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.…”
And yet, while the US applied this principle in Afghanistan and Iraq, it applied it only partially in Pakistan, and failed to apply it at all in Iran, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority.… The options left to the US in fighting its war on terror have been reduced to catch-as-catchcan killing and capturing of terrorists, and reactive actions such as arresting or detaining terrorists when they are caught on US soil.…
[And] the US’s containment strategy in its War on Terror is undermined by the second and third problems inherent to its policies.
The second problem is that since September 11, 2001, the US has steadfastly refused to admit the identity of the enemy it seeks to defeat. US leaders have called that enemy al-Qaida, they have called it extremism or extremists, fringe elements of Islam and radicals. But of course the enemy is jihadist Islam which seeks global leadership and the destruction of Western civilization. Al-Qaida is simply an organization that fights on the enemy’s side. As long as the enemy is left unaddressed, organizations like al-Qaida will continue to proliferate.…
[US authorities’] refusal to acknowledge the nature of the enemy has paralyzed their ability to confront and defeat threats as they arise. For instance, US Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was not removed from service or investigated, despite his known support for jihad and his communication with leading jihadists. Rather, he was promoted and placed in a position where he was capable of massacring 12 soldiers and one civilian at Fort Hood, Texas.…
So too, the US’s refusal to identify its enemy has made it impossible for US officials to understand and contend with the mounting threat from [now-Islamist] Turkey.…
The US’s refusal to reckon with the fact that radical Islam is the enemy fighting it bodes ill for the future. Quite simply, America is willfully blinding itself to emerging dangers. These dangers are particularly acute in Egypt where the US has completely failed to recognize the threat the Muslim Brotherhood constitutes to its core regional interests and its national security.
The last problem intrinsic to the US’s War on Terror is the persistent and powerful strain of appeasement that guides so much of US policy towards the Muslim world.…
The urge to appeasement caused the US to divorce the Islamic jihad against the US from the Islamic jihad against Israel from the outset. Appeasement has been the chief motivating factor informing the US’s intense support for Palestinian statehood and its refusal to reassess this policy in the face of Palestinian terrorism, jihadism and close ties with Iran.
Appeasement provoked the US to embrace radical Islamic religious leaders and terror operatives such as Sami Arian and Abdurahman Alamoudi as credible leaders in the US Muslim community. It stood behind the decisions of both the Bush and Obama administrations to embrace US affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood as legitimate leaders of the American Muslim community and to court the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to the detriment of US ally former president Hosni Mubarak.
Appeasement stood behind the US’s bid to try to entice Iran to end its nuclear weapons programs with grand bargains. It motivated US’s decision not to confront Syria on its known support for al-Qaida and Hezbollah as well as Palestinian terror groups; its proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; or its involvement in facilitating the insurgency in Iraq. It is what has compelled the US not to seek the dismantlement of Hezbollah in Lebanon and indeed to fund and arm the Hezbollah-controlled government and army of Lebanon.…
The US was able to win the Cold War through its policy of containment because throughout the long conflict there was strong majority support in the US for continuing to pursue the war effort. Despite the widespread nature of Soviet efforts at political subversion, US public opinion remained firmly anti-Soviet until the Berlin Wall was finally destroyed.
The US government’s moves to appease its Islamic enemies undermine the domestic consensus supporting the War on Terror. And without such domestic solidarity around the necessity of combating jihadist terrorists, there is little chance that the US will be able to continue to enact its containment strategy for long enough to facilitate victory.…
Since it came to power in January 2009 the Obama administration has worked intensively to confuse the American people about its nature, necessity and goals. President Barack Obama dropped the name “War on Terror” for the nebulous “overseas contingency operation.” He has rejected the term “terrorism,” and expunged the term “jihad” from the official lexicon. In so doing, he made it impermissible for US government officials to hold coherent discussions about the war they are charged with waging. Meanwhile, the public has been invited to question whether the US has the right to fight at all.
Today the events of September 11 are still vivid enough in the American memory for America to continue the fight despite the administration’s efforts to discredit the war in the national discourse and imagination. But how long will that memory be strong enough to serve as the primary legitimating force behind a war that even in its limited form is far from won?
