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September 10? Its Worse Than That
We are ignoring the best tools we have for fighting terrorism. Why?By Andrew C. McCarthy September 10 America. The phrase signifies a reprise of the terrorism is just a crime mindset that reigned in the years before the 9/11 attacks. Like other observers, Ive groused in recent months that we are back to that self-destructive ethos. I was wrong. If the Fort Hood atrocity tells us anything, it is that things are much worse than they were before 9/11. For one thing, 9/11 has happened. Before it did, perhaps we had an excuse. But weve experienced the wages of consciously avoiding Islamism. To have retreated into puerile fantasies about a religion of peace is, at this juncture, unfathomable. Fathom it, though, we must. In 2008, I wrote a book called Willful Blindness to describe governments stubborn refusal to deal with the nature and magnitude of jihadism when it first emerged as a domestic threat in the early Nineties. For a long time, Id resisted writing about the experience of prosecuting Muslim terrorists. Im very proud of what we did, but the story is a painful one of warning signs missed and lives lost. Having lived it, I wasnt anxious to relive it. Yet, more than a decade after Muslim terrorists declared war on the United States by bombing the World Trade Center, we were still making the same errors, with wishful thinking about Islam still substituting for sober analysis. It seemed important to go back to the beginning, to explore why jihadism is a profound threat, why weve underestimated it, and why it is so perilous to treat a national-security challenge as if it were a mere legal problem. In a display of my own wishful thinking, I subtitled the book A Memoir of the Jihad memoir conveying the hope that the worst of the willful blindness was behind us, and that the misjudgments of the past would yield wisdom in the here and now. Rest at link Posted by: ed 2009-11-14 |
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