11-September-2001

I'm not the best person to write a tribute or a memorial: I wasn't there and I didn't know anybody who was.

My life didn't change much, beyond starting to read Bernard Lewis. A few years before a man lit a pail of gasoline in one of the city buses, and I've been watchful since then in ways 9-11 didn't increase.

One change galls me, though. My hope is to point people to heaven, not hurry them to hell. Yet I find I must spend energy trying to remind people that we have to fight the war, and not miss the forest for the leaves. A stunning number of people can't conceive that the Iraq campaign is just one more campaign in a world-wide war.

The blindness isn't just a University-town effect. Most of the Democratic candidates for president seem to have no clue at all that we're in a major struggle, and several seem to think that we should retreat. I'd thought better of Gore, but his pronouncements on Iraq were ludicrous.

I see the war to come as one with pauses, where we make deals with Beelzebub to attack Lucifer (Pakistan and Afghanistan, for example). We'll try to make peaceable relations with Iraq and Iran (both absolutely critical), and hope that Pakistan and Egypt can manage to reject their jihadists. In the meantime the Saudis will keep funding the jihadist schools churning out terrorist supporters, trying to subvert the entire Islamic world to their Wahhabist party line. We try to win hearts and minds from the outside, as infidels; and they try to win from the inside. The jihadists will keep striking wherever they can, and with the collusion of some governments (Pakistan?), use disease and poison weapons. One day Arabia will be partitioned into the Shi'ite oil fields, the Jordanian holy places, and the Saudi desert; but we'll still see decades pass before the damage done by the unholy madrassas is undone.

With this in mind, I see blindness in other quarters as well. Winning the war isn't a matter of "Do A, do B, send the Marines to C." We can lose. We almost certainly will lose at least a city during the war. And unless we have something more than mere secularism to offer, we aren't going to win enough hearts and minds to matter.

I don't fault Bush for dealing with the Saudis--we can't attack them directly and everybody knows it. But why not tell us we're going to have to make some sacrifices? Where is the drive to address the philosophical/religious issues that inspire our enemies? (Ad campaigns about how nice life is for Muslims in the US won't cut it.) Is anybody going to pay attention to the recruiting in our prisons or quit cowering when CAIR glowers? And we're going to need a lot more soldiers... not just National Guard.

And so I find myself having to call for war when I want to call for peace.