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Six Years: The limits of attention span
 On September 12th, 2001, Mickey Kaus wrote that Media coverage of the 9/11 attack often emphasizes that it will be a "long time before America gets back to normal," etc. The opposite is likely to be closer to the truth -- we'll get back to normal all too quickly... I suspect the story will be off the evening news by Thanksgiving -- a denial, in a warped way, of the attackers' disruptive goal.Kaus was wrong, but not by that much. By November, Konduz was about to fall, Johnny Jihad about to be captured, and Tora Bora was a month in the future. Our shattered nation wasn't to turn its attention back to utter bullsquat for at least another three months, when Britney's bosom began to edge out all that obscure stuff in Afghaniland and places like that. It wasn't until April, 2002, that Afghanistan, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda dropped off the front pages of America's major newspapers for the first time - I was watching for it at the time, wondering how long it would take to see a front page without an Afghanistan story. Kaus was right about the phenomenon, wrong about the window. The public can't really be faulted for their lack of attention span. I may have pointed out in these pages a time or two in the past six years that the biggest mistake the Bush administration has made has been not reminding the public each and every day of why we're at war with Islamism and what the consequences will be if we lose. After a brief period of national cohesion, politix reverted to the "as usual" conditions that represent its natural state. The solid, apparently insoluble core of opposition to everything this country tries to do and everything it stands for was still there, still in business at the same old stand all along: ANSWER, Ramsey Clark, Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and all the allies they've picked up along the way. The day the bombing began in Afghanistan they were in the streets protesting. Since then, they've run an unrelenting campaign of propaganda against the war. They aren't precisely on the side of the Islamists. They're merely against anything the United States does. Winning the war to preserve Western civilization in their eyes would enhance our position; therefore we must be stopped. All civilizations, after all, are equally valid in their eyes. Gen. Petraeus testified today. I'm on five or six talking points mailing lists, and the memes were pretty crude:
After six years the public's tired. The Fat Lady's voice isn't overtaxed in this war. The headlines look much the same from day to day, week to week, or worse. Last year's headlines could for the most part fit on today's pages: Binny's still in Pakistain; Hamas is still rejecting; the Talibs are still burning their cannon fodder at a rate of 40-50 a day, their supply apparently inexhaustible. Two years ago Jaafari was Iraq's PM and he was ordering all-out attacks on insurgent strongholds. 5,000 Iraqi and 3,500 US troops were sweeping Tal Afar. The year before that Beslan was till fresh and raw. The progress is there, but usually the public misses it, or misses the significance of it. Worse, the gains are often tenuous, easily reversed, or false alarms. Today the Taliban say they want to negotiate. If true, the end of year after grinding year of war could be in sight for that poor country. Or it could be another false alarm, a false start, the same sort of deal the Talibs across the border worked with Perv and ISI. Hekamatyar, recall, declared a ceasefire a couple months ago. Today he's refusing to talk to the Karzai government unless all the troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan and he gets to rocket Kabul again. The war's not ours to end. We can stop fighting tomorrow, withdraw our troops, bring them home, demobilize them. It won't change things. Bin Laden declared war on us in 1998, long before we declared war on him. Our not fighting back won't change his course unless we surrender and buy turbans, our women to wear sacks, our culture to vanish, our children to be devoted to jihad. If we stop fighting now, we'll start up again in a year, five years, ten years. It's a pay-me-now, pay-me-later kind of world. A cowardly United States, hiding behind its borders, trying to conceal itself in its cloak of multiculturalism, will invite the follow-ons to 9-11-01, and the next time the scale of the attack against us will be greater. And having retreated, having shown the white feather, our response and the support it will receive worldwide will be weaker. Posted by: Fred 2007-09-11 |
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