This weblog has been in existence for three and one-half years through various incarnations, starting on Blogger and then changing to a hosting service where I installed MovableType, eventually changing to WordPress because of the irritations of the way the free version of MovableType creates static pages.

I know I’ve written more posts than 1970, but this is what WordPress marked as the number of this particular post for September 11, 2006.

Two years ago on September 11, 2004, I wrote this:

11 September 2004 - 23:59 UTC
Some thoughts…

…on lessons once learned and now apparently lost

The world did not change on September 11, 2001. What changed was the perception of the world held by the average American. This is an important difference that has gotten lost in all of the sound and fury over the election, the “War on Terror”, and the sniping between the radical left and the radical right.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, the vast majority of Americans had only a superficial understanding of the world outside North America, when they bothered thinking about anything outside of the United States at all. For the decade before September 11, 2001, the United States did nothing to create the hatred that was manifested by the murders committed on that day. That hatred existed long before, was reared by the progenitors of a radical philosophy not unlike what has been seen many times in history, and continues to be nurtured by those same leaders and their successors. The followers have only a superficial understanding of the world outside of their own community, and that perception is distorted by both ignorance and the rage arising from feeling helpless. The truth is that they are not helpless, but that they are not willing to take responsibility for where they are. The truth also is that they have no true leaders willing to teach that responsibility and to lead them out of their self-induced poverty. Instead, they follow the leaders who blame others for their woes and offer a chance to strike back against those they blame.

The world did not change on September 11, 2001. What changed was the perception of the world held by the average American, but since that terrible day the world has changed, and not for the better. Unless the nature of those changes and the reasons underlying them are understood, America runs the risk of not only losing more lives, both of soldiers and at home, but also of losing the war we now find ourselves waging.

On the morning of September 11, 2004, the vast majority of Americans still only have a superficial understanding of the world outside of North America, when they bother trying to understand anything outside of the United States instead of simply reacting with fear towards the unknown. In the three years since September 11, 2001, the United States has engaged in one war directly linked to the murders committed on that day. That war has nearly been forgotten in the shadows cast by a second war that was justified using several reasons, and the shadows darken because the apparent clarity of those reasons has become muddied as time passes and more blood is spilled. Today, atrocity builds upon atrocity in a spiral of escalating horror because each barbarity numbs our souls more and our enemies need to keep the terror alive to feed their insatiable lust for vengeance.

Since what happened 35 years ago in the context of the Vietnam War is apparently more politically current than what is to be done now to fight the war we are in now, we should at least recall that war was lost not on the battlefield but in the United States itself. The divisions inside the nation forced the politicians to change policy in such a way that abandoned South Vietnam and effectively lost the war. As Napoleon said, the moral is to the physical as three is to one. The United States is now as divided as it was during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Regardless of who wins the election in 2004, the administration that follows needs to explain to the entire citizenry of the United States the nature of the war we are now in, the larger war, not just the Iraq War, why this larger war needs to be fought, and how it can be won. We cannot win the war as a nation divided the way we are now. A leadership that consists of preaching to the choir the rosy scenarios of a democratic domino effect in the MidEast is not true leadership, and it worse than whistling in the dark. Unfortunately that is what I have seen in the past three years.

The moral is to the physical as three is to one. We applied this in birthing our nation. The Founders in fighting the American Revolution never had the resources to defeat the British Empire. George Washington lost many more battles than he won. Independence was gained only when the British no longer had the will to fight to keep control of the rebellious colonies.

The moral is to the physical as three is to one. That should have been proven to us on September 11, 2001, where the efforts of 19 murdered thousands and terrorized millions. We will not win the war we are now waging by “nuking ‘em till they glow,” nor will we win it solely through other military means. In Vietnam, we won every battle, but we never destroyed the will of our enemy to fight. We run the same risk now if we do not attack our enemies in ways that destroy their will to fight, to sacrifice, and to die. We are not making these efforts to understand the weaknesses of what motivates our enemies, and we are not defeating the motivation that drives them to attack us. Until we do this, we are on the path to losing this war.

UPDATE: From Mark Helprin, an article that better states the point I try to make above. Read the whole thing, published by The Wall Street Journal at OpinionJournal:

We have followed a confusion of war aims that seem to report after the fact what we have done rather than to direct what we do. We could, by threatening the existence of Middle Eastern regimes, which live to hold power, enforce our insistence that the Arab world eradicate the terrorists within its midst. Instead, we have embarked upon the messianic transformation of an entire region, indeed an entire civilization, in response to our inability to pacify even a single one of its countries. As long as our war aims stray from the disciplined, justifiable, and attainable objective of self-defense, we will be courting failure.

Our strategy has been deeply inadequate especially in light of the fact that we have refused to build up our forces even as our aims have expanded to the point of absurdity. We might have based in northern Saudi Arabia within easy range of the key regimes that succor terrorism, free to coerce their cooperation by putting their survival in question. Our remounted infantry would have been refreshed, reinforced, properly supported, unaffected by insurgency, and ready to strike. The paradigm would have shifted from conquer, occupy, fail, and withdraw–to strike, return, and re-energize. At the same time, we would not have solicited challenges, as we do now, from anyone who sees that although we may be occupying Iraq, Iraq is also occupying us.

We have abstained from mounting an effective civil defense. Only a fraction of a fraction of our wealth would be required to control the borders of and entry to our sovereign territory, and not that much more to discover, produce, and stockpile effective immunizations, antidotes, and treatments in regard to biological and chemical warfare. Thirty years ago the entire country had been immunized against smallpox. Now, no one is, and the attempt to cover a minuscule part of the population failed miserably and was abandoned. Not only does this state of affairs leave us vulnerable to a smallpox epidemic, it stimulates the terrorists to bring one about. So with civil aviation, which, despite the wreckage and tragedy of September 11, is protected in an inefficient, irresponsible, and desultory fashion.

…

Neither the 9/11 commission, the president, nor the Democratic nominee has a clear vision of how to fight and defend in this war. Partly this is because so many Americans do not yet feel, as some day they may, the gravity of what we are facing.

Three years on, that is where we stand: our strategy shiftless, reactive, irrelevantly grandiose; our war aims undefined; our preparations insufficient; our civil defense neglected; our polity divided into support for either a hapless and incompetent administration that in a parliamentary system would have been turned out long ago, or an opposition so used to appeasement of America’s rivals, critics, and enemies that they cannot even do a credible job of pretending to be resolute.

Will it take more atrocities, more mass-murders committed within the borders of the United States to wake up BOTH the left-wing and right-wing from their mutual fantasies of destroying their political opponents to see the true enemy?

note: The next to the last paragraph in the quoted passages above was edited to add “9/11″ to the sentence beginning “Neither the commission, the president…” for clarity.

So much for two years ago, on the third anniversary of the murders on September 11, 2001. Little has changed since then, just as nothing that really matters has truly changed since September 10, 2001.

What was my reaction to the attacks when I learned what had happened on that day?

Anger, but not surprise.

The anger was not directed at those who perpetrated the crimes, although I do not absolve them of their murderous acts. No, I was angry at those who did not have the imagination I had, a visualization of how easy it would be for any of our enemies to commit an attack such as that which occurred on that day, especially after the earlier attacks on the very same buildings, which despite the apparent Keystone Kops nature of the attackers and their organization were a warning that was not heeded.

Who should have heeded that warning?

Everyone, not just the government, not just the police, not just the firefighters.

We have only ourselves to blame, because we ALL should have heeded it.

Almost nothing truly important about how we view the world at large has changed since September 10, 2001.

Yet, with our insular natures, our navel-gazing that persists even to this day despite the lessons we should have taken from the murderous intrusion of the outside world into our seemingly clean consciousness. We still cannot think outside of the immediate effects to the ultimate consequences.

We still gaze inward more than we seek outward to understand.

This has consequences easy to foresee, for those who choose to make the small effort to do so.

Far too many do not choose to make that effort.

I am still angry, and the anger is still directed towards my fellow citizens of the United States, still insular, still looking inward, still choosing to not understand the larger world of which America, whether an idea or an ideal, is but a part.

My anger is directed towards those who are willing to sacrifice ideals along with civil liberties in a search for some sense of safety and security, one that would be just as false as that we had on September 10, 2001.

My anger is directed towards those who use fear to gain their political goals, no matter who they are, no matter which party, no matter what nationality.

My anger is directed towards those have abused the word “war” to attain some short-term and ultimately small-minded goal, whether it be a “war on drugs” or a “war on pornography”.

My anger is directed towards those who have no moral qualms about our nation maintaining secret prisons, regardless of location, and using interrogation techniques that under any rational analysis would be considered torture, no matter what the protestations to the contrary made by the man who currently holds the office of President of the United States.

We make icons out of the collapsed twin towers of the New York World Trade Center, we make saints out of those murdered on that day of terror, and we call “hallowed ground” the foundations of buildings that many regarded as eyesores on the skyline of New York when the structures were first raised.

Even though we are indeed a secular society, somehow the actions of criminals have created places and people regarded as sacred.

Note, “sacred ground” was not coined by me but has been commonly used for “ground zero” (which was another unintentionally ironic appellation applied to the World Trade Center site, calling to mind the aftermath of a nuclear explosion of which only the US has used against an enemy), and also note the definition of sacred:

sacred

[sey-krid]

adjective
1. devoted or dedicated to a deity or to some religious purpose; consecrated.

2. entitled to veneration or religious respect by association with divinity or divine things; holy.

3. pertaining to or connected with religion (opposed to secular or profane): sacred music; sacred books.

4. reverently dedicated to some person, purpose, or object: a morning hour sacred to study.

5. regarded with reverence: the sacred memory of a dead hero.

6. secured against violation, infringement, etc., as by reverence or sense of right: sacred oaths; sacred rights.

7. properly immune from violence, interference, etc., as a person or office.

I am not being deliberately obtuse here, the fact that the first four definitions involve some type of religious reference has not been lost, neither by our secular society nor by our enemies, who also base their pleas for recruits using the sacred in opposition to the secular.

Why is this important?

If we, the citizens of the United States, focus on the sacred to the detriment of the secular, then we truly have created a war, but it is WE who have created it.

The United States was indeed attacked on September 11, 2001, but not by a nation. We were attacked by a group of thugs whom we have elevated far beyond and above anything they deserved by our reaction to their crimes.

By declaring a “war on terror” we have raised those who oppose us up from a bunch of thuggish wanna-be’s to a group that can challenge the sole superpower.

And then those who claim they can lead us use the tactics of fear for their political gain.

It is not only the ever-so-conveniently-difficult-to-identify-or-define “terrorists” who use fear for venal political ends.

Like children, we serve our fears.

Like children, we refuse to grow up and recognize that the world is a complex, dangerous place and the simple-minded strategies advocated by those who have been merchants of fear for decades are both wrong-headed and ultimately suicide for our nation and our society.

On this day that most are writing syrupy memorial posts, I will state this:

The United States has become a nation of spoiled, overly-comfortable children of all ages.

We are unwilling to acknowledge or even recognize there is a world beyond our own thoughts and perceptions.

We know nothing of the fire and terror and blood and piss and death that most of the world has to deal with on a daily basis.

And we don’t even know what we don’t know.

We listen only to those who shout the loudest, those who have no shame, those who are willing to exploit grief and horror.

We are imperiling our freedoms because of our sentimentality, and we are imperiling our safety because of our narcissism.