Here is an article from NRO on my "Hobbyhorse", Win. Guaranteed to tick you off. :>)
August 13, 2002 9:00 a.m.
America, Be Angry
This is no time to "get over" Sept. 11.
An old military friend in town over the weekend spoke with great passion about the absolute imperative to go to war to defeat militant Islam, come what may. This same friend, in the days after September 11, chastised me strongly via e-mail from his posting in Bosnia. As a friend and colleague of Bosnian Muslims, he upbraided me for my grieved and intemperate messages from New York about what I thought the United States should do to the men who committed mass murder in my city, and those Muslim regimes around the world who support them. What had changed?
"They threatened to kill a lot of people I knew," he said.
He explained that days after the attack, authorities in Bosnia arrested a gang of radical Algerian Muslims with al Qaeda connections who were planning to murder American civilians in Bosnia; the Algerians were eventually transported to Guantanamo. For my friend, the war had quite literally come home, as it had for all of us living in New York and around the Pentagon area on September 11. He understood in a personal way that these lunatics intend to kill us.
And he has had banked the burning anger in his heart since then, because he knows now that as the nation prepares for war with Iraq, he is going to need to draw on it to sustain himself and his family through what may be bloody and painful days ahead.
There are not enough Americans like him, I fear. In the past year, the anger and resolve that gripped the nation in the immediate aftermath of September 11 seems to have dissipated. Not everywhere, mind you: on my recent trip down South, I saw American flags everywhere, and lots of men wearing NYPD and FDNY caps, and fading T-shirts trumpeting slogans like, "Never forget!" But nobody can doubt that America is not where it needs to be, emotionally and psychologically, as we get ready for a war that could result in thousands of American casualties, and perhaps even biological, chemical and even nuclear attacks on our cities.
The attack on Pearl Harbor left the American people so outraged that they were prepared to sustain serious hardship, even the sacrifice of their sons, to right that wrong and vanquish our enemies. "Always will we remember the character of the onslaught against us," said President Roosevelt, in his December 8 speech asking Congress for a declaration of war. "No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. I believe I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again."
"Hostilities exist," the president continued. "There is no blinking at the fact that that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God."
The American government, and the American people, were as good as Roosevelt's word. Can we say that today? After a series of attacks against two of the greatest American cities, assaults that left many, many more dead than Pearl Harbor, and the grisly images of which were broadcast worldwide, I don't sense the kind of widespread anger that would enable this country's leadership to sustain an extended military campaign, a campaign that we resist at our grave peril.
In a 1997 column titled "Why the U.S. Won't Go to War," Michael Kelly observed that in the waning days of the Gulf War, he was so shocked by the images of slaughtered Iraqi Republican Guardsmen retreating to Baghdad that he, like many Americans, instantly was convinced that the war had to end. Five years on, with Saddam still in power and working on weapons of mass destruction, Kelly realized that he had been wrong, that it was the far better thing to kill even more Iraqi soldiers, and remove the dictator. A 1995 stint covering the war in Bosnia, observing how an outgunned and outmanned group of Bosnians in Bihac saved their lives by savagely holding off Serbian invaders, taught him a valuable lesson about courage, and the lack of it in contemporary American culture.
"We are a nation in which there are fewer and fewer people, and they are older and older people, who accept what every 12-year-old in Bihac knows: that there are things worth dying for, and killing for," Kelly wrote.
Five years have passed since then, and Saddam is still there, stockpiling and likely weaponizing anthrax, cholera, and botulinum toxin, a concentrated pound of which can kill a billion people. Can you sleep knowing what that madman is brewing for you in his desert cauldrons? Can you live with the thought that Arab Muslim terrorists will carry out another September 11-like attack on America? You couldn't if you'd gone through it.
In his most recent column Russ Smith of The New York Press lashes out at those folks who didn't endure that terrible day and its aftermath here at Ground Zero, and who are too ready to "get over it." Now, there's a danger of going too far into emotional exhibitionism and moral one-upsmanship with this sort of thing, but Smith is dead right to remind the rest of the country that we have suffered at the hands of radical Islam, and we continue to suffer in ways that non-New Yorkers can only partly appreciate ( see my September 20 New York Post column). The point is simply that we have seen up close what these Islamic monsters can and will do, and some of us are concerned that many of our fellow Americans just don't get it.
I spent the weekend reading a new book out from Gannett's Newseum called Running Towards Danger, an oral history of September 11 by journalists who covered it. I couldn't put it down (Full disclosure: I'm quoted twice in the book), because the memories of my colleagues who saw far more that horrible day than I did brought the terror back. Let this quote from New York Post photographer Bolivar Arellano stand for them all:
I survived massacres and covered civil wars in Ecuador and Colombia and (El) Salvador. I've seen everything a human can do to another human being. I thought I had seen everything until this happened. I was crying day and night remembering those lives lost for no reason. It was the first time my kids saw me crying.
Finishing the book on Sunday, I took out a box into which my wife had put our 9/11 memorabilia. There was the page from my notepad on which I captured the exact moment the first tower went down, my increasingly hysterical scrawl ("the building isn't there it's gone!") leaps and lurches like a seismograph. There was the plane ticket that floated into our backyard. There was the September 12 edition of the New York Times, whose lead editorial said:
Remember the ordinary, if you can. Remember how normal New York City seemed at sunrise yesterday, as beautiful a morning as ever dawns in early September. ...Everyone was preoccupied, in just the way we usually call innocence. And by 10:30 a.m. all that had gone. Lower Manhattan had become an ashen shell of itself, all but a Pompeii under the impact of a terrorist attack involving two airliners that crashed into the World Trade Center and then brought its Twin Towers down. In Washington, a third plane had plunged into the Pentagon. ... For all Americans, the unimaginable became real.
Now, less than one month from the first anniversary, it seems like most of America sees the reality of what happened here as mostly imaginary, a TV event. How else to account for the lack of righteous anger to take the fight to the enemy, to see justice done to mass murderers, and those who would murder us in our beds? Do Americans even have the capacity for sustained righteous anger anymore, like our grandfathers and grandmothers of the Pearl Harbor generation did? Or are we like that decadent European friend of mine who argued with me that this war on terrorism was no business of his country's, that he saw no compelling reason to risk his comfortable middle-class life to fight Islamic extremism?
The most patriotic thing the networks can do in the days running up to the September 11 anniversary is run those pictures of the planes crashing into the towers, over and over. They were taken off the air days after the attack, for fear of traumatizing the shocked nation. Well, we need to be shocked again. We need to be traumatized again. Our national survival depends on it. And this time, don't withhold the images of human beings jumping to their deaths from the upper floors of the towers. We can handle the truth.
Next month, the one-year anniversary of 9/11 will be marked at a ceremony at the mass graveyard that once were the Twin Towers. There will be no original oratory spoken there, which, depressingly, would have been true even if the leaders gathered had written their own speeches instead of decided to recite the Gettysburg Address, and so forth. The sorry state of public oratory and public orators is not sufficient to the times. How fitting it would be, though, if someone would place the war America now must fight into historical context by offering a paraphrase of the Berlin Wall speech given in 1963 by a member of that Pearl Harbor generation, President John F. Kennedy:
There are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and the radical Islamic world. Let them come to Ground Zero. There are some who say that radical Islam is the solution to the problems of the Islamic world. Let them come to Ground Zero. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the radical Islamists and the states who back them. Let them come to Ground Zero. And there are even a few who say that it is true that radical Islam is an evil system, but we have no right to judge others. Let them come to Ground Zero.
And let them rage, rage so that all of us will defend our country to the uttermost, rage until this nation gains the inevitable triumph that we owe it to the living and the dead to win, so help us God. Damn it, people, let's roll!
nationalreview.com |
