How can it have been five years?
1,826 days. 260 weeks. Sixty months. Half a decade. I was 41 that cruel, warm, sunny day in September. I am 46 this cruel, warm, sunny day in September.
I’d been married almost exactly a year. I’ve now been married almost exactly six years.
My father was still alive.
My sister was about to get married again.
Mom hadn’t yet had her mastectomy.
Suddenly, two tall seriously ugly buildings crumbled to dust along with nearly 3000 human souls. A building dedicated to war and later to defense, being built when my father went to war in the 1940’s, had a flaming hole in it. A plume of black smoke marked a crater in a field in Western Pennsylvania.
And our world changed. The two seriously ugly buildings became iconic, and (non-military) wars are still being fought over what to do about the place where they stood. The building dedicated to war, then defense, flipped back to war (the civilians would handle defense this time). The plane that crashed in Pennsylvania turned out to have had a load of patriots on board who cared more about their fellow countrymen than about themselves. We went from defense to offense in less than two hours, and we haven’t turned the ball over yet.
It’s hard being so steeped in Pearl Harbor history and pre-history. To me it was almost deja vu. To my father I recall asking (before the buildings fell), “Didn’t think you’d see another Pearl Harbor in your lifetime, did you?”
He hadn’t. But I don’t think he was overly surprised.
Five years on, we’re still fighting. We’ve reached that point in the war when everyone needs to take a breath. Hopefully we won’t change course and decide to give up because “it’s been too long” or because “the enemy is resurgent” or because “we have to ask ourselves why they hate us”. Because none of those are good reasons to stop.
The parties who make these arguments are not so much non-serious as they are difficult to take seriously. (I’m sure they mean what they say. I just don’t happen to agree with it.) And the continued argument about who’s responsible for the war has gotten terribly old. As James Lileks and Glenn Reynolds have independently pointed out, it’s not important what happened on 9/10 and before. A “reset” was performed on 9/11/2001 (just like the “reset” that was performed on 12/7/1941) and we’re now more interested in what you’ve done for us since then. To paraphrase Lileks, asking questions about how we mishandled the terrorist threat prior to 9/11 is like asking questions about Hawaiian port security prior to December, 1941. It’s not important anymore. What’s important is how we are handling the aftermath.
Anyone who still wants to argue that the Clintonistas had a better handle on terrorism than the Bushies, or vice versa, has got a 9/10 mentality, is missing the larger picture, and should be totally and completely ignored.
Whether we like it or not, we’ve got a war to fight and win. It simply won’t do to pull everyone out of Iraq and Afghanistan and where the hell ever else we have them and bring them all home. It doesn’t matter anymore why they hate us; in fact, we don’t care if they do, as long as they keep their hate at home. The biggest mistake we can make in this war is to concern ourselves with whether or not America and Americans are “liked”. Nobody is ever going to “like” us. And we aren’t ever going to have “friends”. (As I learned many years ago in Diplomatic History I, we don’t have friends — we have allies. And that includes our “friends” the British. No country can ever be expected to subordinate its own ambition to ours; therefore all so-called “friendships” and “special relationships” are really alliances of convenience.)
We did not start this war. We may have misunderstood (or not cared) how certain of our policies looked to certain radicals like Osama bin Laden. But we did not hijack four planes and fly three of them into, say, the Petronas Towers, either. The hostilities in this war were begun by the other side, and as usual, we’re simply cleaning up the mess.
And cleaning up the mess means seeing to our own back yard. Organizations like CAIR and MSA and MPAC and CodePink and ANSWER and all their fellow-travellers need to be exposed for what they really are. Individuals like Maher Hathout and Ibrahim Hooper and their ilk should be called out for talking out of both sides of their mouths. Iranian presidents and ex-presidents should be excluded from this country, regardless of agreements of free passage that we might have with the UN. (The UN should get out, too, but that’s another story.)
Most importantly in our local housecleaning, Muslim Americans need to make up their minds as to whether they are Americans first or Muslims first. If the former, they need to stand up and denounce radical Islam. If they are the latter, they need to be invited to get themselves hence to somewhere else. I’ll admit that the likelihood of Muslim Americans taking a firm stand against jihad is pretty slim. But either it has to happen or they have to go. There is no place in the American Experiment for those who would overthrow it by force and subject it to theocracy.
I hold no brief against Muslims at large; it is the radicals in their midst that cause me heartburn. But more and more the term “Muslim” is beginning to sound like “radical jihadist who is out to destroy America and the free world.” This is something American Muslims had better think long and hard about before the sleeping giant awakes and destroys them. Because the choice really is binary: You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists and those who back them. If you think you can take the middle ground, you are in essence saying “I am a dhimmi, I welcome the caliphate.”
When I think of this war, I keep coming back to the line from The Hunt for Red October: “Forty years I’ve been at sea. A war at sea. A war with no battles, no monuments… only casualties.” And I get chills thinking back on the Cold War, World War III.
World War IV — for that’s what it is, and we’d better get used to it — is going to be a long war. There will be plenty of battles and perhaps a few monuments. And absolutely many more casualties — it’s war, damn it. It is an inescapable fact that people die in war.
We’d better get used to it. Or we’d better start learning Arabic.