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How we've changed in five years
| This represents some ideas I've been having for the past couple weeks. I'll probably revisit this several times in the course of the day, so there's no guarantee the post as of 23:00 will like much like the post at 00:00. I'll make further changes as an editor, and the other editors can feel free to contribute as they please. |
Not quite a week after 9-11-01 the New York Times yes, that New York Times ran an editorial entitled "How We've Changed in a Week." They found, prematurely, that the nation had gotten "back to normal":But the normal we are returning to is different from what we knew a week ago. | What you might call "an abnormal normality." |
Tuesday's tragedies were not only unifying but clarifying. Americans now live a state of war against an irrational, vengeful and elusive enemy.
| This is a statement of fact. Some of us have kept this statement of fact in mind for five years. The New York Times isn't among them. |
And if we are to win, we will have to become used to the idea that we are in this for the long haul. Coming to terms with that new reality, winning this war, will require discipline, stamina and sacrifice. True, and wise words, even if long forgotten by the people who wrote them. We're five years into a war that will probably run for a generation, perhaps longer. The enemy remains vengeful and elusive, though much better defined now. We can clearly see, assuming we're paying attention, not a monolithic enemy but a multiheaded hydra. - There is al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's creation, still in business, now fragmented, its forces augmented by wannabe terrorists worldwide, its leadershhip confined to the backwoods insularity of the Pak-Afghan border more Pak than Afghan, if our assessment is correct.
- There is Iran, the fountainhead of Shiite terrorism, parent of Hezbollah and patron of Syria, which isn't particular about the religious orientation of the terrorists it patronizes.
- There is the Muslim Brotherhood and its offspring Hamas, confining itself to tormenting Israel, while probing the limits of the democratic process to try and take power in Egypt and Jordan.
- There is a separate group of Pakistani-sponsored or abetted terrorist organizations, Lashkar-e-Taiba preeminent among them at the moment, which bedevil India and which make common cause with al-Qaeda. Along with Lashar are the poorly controlled offshoots of Pak jihadism like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.
- And toward the bottom of the list we have the Marxist groups like PFLP, DFLP, and Fatah itself, the living legacy of patrons have gone out of business, the Maoists in Nepal, the NPA in the Philippines, and FARC in Colombia.
| I forgot to include the overt fascisms like Sammy's Baath Party, the Syrian Baathists, and the amalgam of Islamism and fascism that runs Sudan. They make common cause with the Qutbists out of a combination of self-preservation and anti-Westernism... |
- Overlaying virtually all of the Islamist is Qutbist thought, combining the techniques pioneered by the Marxists and the anarchists with the theology of the Wahhabists on one hand and the nonsense of the Mahdi on the other.
- Financing the Wonderful World of Terror is the Muslim man in the street, though his charitable donations, and oil the oil that fuels the Iranian economy and the oil that makes the Saudi princes rich. Every time the price of a barrel of oil goes up a dollar, that's another dollar available to finance our demise.
- And legitimizing and coordinating it all is the Ulema, the Learned Elders of Islam, loosely organized in the Supreme Council of Global Jihad. We don't hear about them anymore, but they're still there, and we keep hearing from the individual holy men who make up the Council of Boskone.
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The Times then goes on to explain what's required of us:For years now, younger Americans have yearned to prove that they are as patriotic and as capable of self-sacrifice as the Greatest Generation. The commitment made after Pearl Harbor was both larger and simpler than the one we are being asked to undertake.
| It says much about the quality of thought — the quality of people — making up the U.S. military as opposed to those making up the New York Times that one's stayed on target and the other's been drifting since about a month after this article was written. |
Back then, the aim was clear, the path was obvious, and the sense of solidarity was natural for a country that had to focus single-mindedly on winning World War II. Americans have in fact proven their patriotism and their commitment. Today they're fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they're working in support of the war effort in dozens of other countries. They're men and women who are living up to the example provided by the heroes of 9-11: the men of Flight 93, the NYPD and FDNY, Barbara Olsen and a host of others. These are the men and women of the current Greatest Generation, the ones who don't flinch, don't whine, just go in and get the job done.Our shared mission, to eradicate terrorism, is a noble one.
| It's also a lonely mission. Much of the rest of the world is frightened of the task. |
The rewards for victory would be immense a safer world and a planetary commitment to cooperation and tolerance. But our individual tasks are vague. President Bush is unlikely to reinstate the draft or impose rationing. We will go about our ordinary jobs as before. Buying consumer goods is not only possible, it has been elevated to a virtual act of patriotism to aid a flagging economy. Nevertheless, we will need to make sacrifices that are all the more difficult because they are unseen and require more patience than heroism. There's the rub, isn't it? It's hard to be patient. The heroism of patience doesn't involve running into burning buildings. Patience doesn't go well with a short attention span.American resilience, which allows us to bounce back from setbacks, forgive old enemies and rewrite our national story for every generation, has a downside. Some may call it a short national attention span.
That's what we call it around these parts. We've dwelt upon that very subject numerous times. That fact is, the Times is no less susceptible to Short Attention Span Syndrome than is Joe Sixpack and Harriet Soccermom.Yesterday's crusade is tomorrow's inconvenience. The gas crisis that was supposed to commit us to energy conservation quickly gave way to the S.U.V. era. People who willingly stand in lines to get through airport security this month may not be so understanding by the Thanksgiving holidays. The patience lasted past that first Thanksgiving, but not by all that much.
| It was evaporating by Christmas. Part of that evaporation was given impetus by Congress' move to make airport screeners civil servants. |
It would have lasted longer had the nation accepted the War on Terror as a matter of life and death, but without a draft, without rationing, without the mobilization for total war it's understandable that it wore off.Perhaps most painful of all, America may have to give up the post-Vietnam illusion that it is possible to fight wars with few casualties.
| The Times, with its emphasis on our casualties and the rights of the bad guyz, obviously hasn't given up its illusions... |
Our success in the Persian Gulf and even our limited achievements in the Balkans created the illusion that American military technology is sophisticated enough to be used in combat without putting soldiers in harm's way.
| Soldiers go "in harm's way" — I hate that term, by the way. Soldiers don't just hang themselves out there for danger to find. — for a reason, that reason being to achieve objectives, to whit, the defeat of the enemy. Good commanders try to achieve their objectives with the minimum of casualties. By the same token, good commanders know that they will likely have to expend precious lives to achieve those objectives. Horribly bad commanders sacrifice their men by the thousands to achieve their objectives, and another kind of horribly bad commander refuses to make the sacrifice, thereby forfeiting the objectives. |
But what we have actually been enjoying is an extended string of luck.
| The light casualties we've taken have not been a matter of luck, a point the Times missed because they have no particular understanding of military tactics. Our casualties in combined arms operations have been remarkably low. This will continue when and if we go to war with Iran and/or Syria. Military operations that aren't firmly based on combined arms will be higher. Occupation casualties can be even higher, especially when faced with a determined combination of Baathist guerrilla warfare and Islamist terrorism. |
Last week, the message came through loud and clear that luck can run out. In that past few years it's been seldom that we've read the opinion pages of the Times and nodded in agreement. With bodies still unrecovered from the rubble, with soot and the smell of death still in the air, the Times, like the rest of the nation, could see what needed to be done. The could even see what the pitfalls of the coming years would be. But after five years of politix as usual, business as usual, and a constant parade of the usual suspects across the front pages, they've fallen victim again, like much of the rest of the nation to the very things they warned about.
The gravest mistake, the most egregious error, that the Bush administration has made has been to let the public forget, to return to business as usual, when the enemy we face means to destroy us. Probably, rather than pulling retirees out of retirement to fill support slots the draft should have been reinstated. Probably, since we're at war with an enemy that's financed by oil money, we should have instituted gasoline rationing.
But those are should haves. We didn't do those things. We're stuck with the world the way it is. We'll have to live with the consequences of not doing those things, which means we're going to have to work around the problems they raise. Like most shortcuts, it will boil down to "pay me now or pay me later," with the payment being in lives and resources.
Posted by: Fred 2006-09-11 |
