Five Years Later

Five years ago, killers who had long before called their shot, killed 3000 Americans. They were trying to kill a whole lot more – in the tens of thousands.

Five years ago, most of us realized that we were right smack in the middle of a war. We were just a half-decade late but at least, now, we were in the fight.

Except that we’re really not. We still inspect blue-haired grandmothers at airports because we’re afraid to name and confront our enemies. We can not summon the will to clearly and publicly identify the people who are trying to kill us. We couch our terms in mousy happy-sounding terms, as if happiness and understanding will solve a problem that it has utterly failed to solve for decades. We seem far more interested in so-called “Muslim Backlash” than we are in making sure that Muslims aren’t actually helping other Muslims to kill us by the bushel.

I am ashamed at times at how little interest we seem to have in honestly facing the problem before us and acting to solve it. Our media outlets have decided that we can not be trusted to see images from that day, even though it shows no such hesitation with images and stories that drive the Muslim world into greater paroxyms of hatred and violence.

I thought, five years ago, that 3000 dead would be more than sufficient motivation to rouse our nation from its vain and selfish torpor. It honestly seems these days that I was wrong. If anything, September 11 has become an occasion to do anything else but remember the dead. It has become grist for unhinged and conspiracy-minded academics who have more free time and hatred than good sense and every day those conspiracies creep farther and farther into the mainstream.

Time Magazine’s cover today shouts “What We’ve Lost” in giant print. Five years ago it took the magazine less than a month to question the threat, and less than two months to run a goofy cover photo of the President. Newsweek gave us all a month before it wondered why they hate us so as if it was necessary to understand this hatred to push back against it. I don’t recall Newsweek attempting to understand any other sort of hatred. But this hatred is special because…well…just because. Now sit down and go back to sleep.

We have done some wonders in five years. We’ve not had to face another terrorist attack here in America. We’ve toppled two of the most brutal regimes in the history of the world and set their people on a path that, if we do not grow bored with it, will take them down the same road of travails we walked when we were learing what to do with our liberty. Those are tremendous achievements. An objective history will, in a century, look back on them as momentous. We don’t see that now, but that’s the advantage of time. It gives distance and clarity.

But that’s a long way away and it presumes that we survive the war we’re now fighting. On that point I still feel pessimistic. I’ve seen little lately to give me great optimism. I expect that soon, September 11 will be just another day mentioned only in the occasional news report as the President lays a wreath on a couple holes in the ground in New York City and the History Channel runs a couple documentaries. After a while, I don’t imagine we’ll see even that.

Mostly because I don’t think the History Channel broadcasts in Arabic.

UPDATE: James Lileks has quite an interesting alternate history, for those who prefer their days of remembrance covered in daisies.

Mark Steyn, as usual, has a column worth your attention as well. It’s cautionary – but isn’t that the watchword of the days? An excerpt:

In the New York Times, Thomas Friedman wrote: “The failure to prevent Sept. 11 was not a failure of intelligence or coordination. It was a failure of imagination.” That’s not really true. Islamist terrorists had indicated their interest in U.S. landmarks, and were known to have plans to hijack planes to fly into them. But men like John O’Neill could never quite get the full attention of a somnolent federal bureaucracy. The terrorists must have banked on that: After all, they took their pilot-training classes in America, apparently confident that, even if anyone noticed the uptick in Arab enrollments at U.S. flight schools, a squeamish culture of political correctness would ensure nothing was done about it.

Five years on, half America has retreated to the laziest old tropes, filtering the new struggle through the most drearily cobwebbed prisms: All dramatic national events are JFK-type conspiracies, all wars are Vietnam quagmires. Meanwhile, Ramzi Yousef’s successors make their ambitions as plain as he did: They want to acquire nuclear technology in order to kill even more of us. And, given that free societies tend naturally toward a Katrina mentality of doing nothing until it happens, one morning we will wake up to another day like the “day that changed everything.” Sept. 11 was less “a failure of imagination” than an ability to see that America’s enemies were hiding in plain sight.

They still are.

Christopher Hitchens also should be on the reading list today. Here’s a bit from him:

One must have a blunt answer to the banal chat-show and op-ed question: What have we learned? (The answer ought not to be that we have learned how to bully and harass citizens who try to take shampoo on flights on which they have lawfully booked passage. Yet incompetent collective punishment of the innocent, and absurd color-coding of the “threat level,” is the way in which most Americans actually experience the “war on terror.”) Anyone who lost their “innocence” on September 11 was too naïve by far, or too stupid to begin with. On that day, we learned what we ought to have known already, which is that clerical fanaticism means to fight a war which can only have one victor. Afghans, Kurds, Kashmiris, Timorese and many others could have told us this from experience, and for nothing (and did warn us, especially in the person of Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance). Does anyone suppose that an ideology that slaughters and enslaves them will ever be amenable to “us”? The first duty, therefore, is one of solidarity with bin-Ladenism’s other victims and targets, from India to Kurdistan.

The second point makes me queasy, but cannot be ducked. “We”–and our allies–simply have to become more ruthless and more experienced. An unspoken advantage of the current awful strife in Iraq and Afghanistan is that it is training tens of thousands of our young officers and soldiers to fight on the worst imaginable terrain, and gradually to learn how to confront, infiltrate, “turn,” isolate and kill the worst imaginable enemy. These are faculties that we shall be needing in the future. It is a shame that we have to expend our talent in this way, but it was far worse five years and one day ago, when the enemy knew that there was a war in progress, and was giggling at how easy the attacks would be, and “we” did not even know that hostilities had commenced. Come to think of it, perhaps we were a bit “innocent” after all.