SEPTEMBER 11 REMEMBERED
September 11, 2001 wasn't the beginning of this war. In fact, fundamentalist Islamists had been making war on the United States for years, with the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, the attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 (which was intended to topple both towers, but failed), all the way back, in some sense, to the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran back when Jimmy Carter was president. For all those years, they were at war with us, but we largely ignored it.
But September 11, 2001 was when we woke up, and realized what was going on. When people talk about the 1,000th casualty in Iraq, it's worth remembering that we had 3,000 casualties in a single day, in America, and that terrorists want to do much, much worse.
It's a war. Reasonable people can argue about how to go about waging it. But -- as someone who thinks that when you're at war, the war is the thing that matters most -- what bothers me about John Kerry is that he doesn't really seem to think we're at war at all. He's said a lot more about his four months waging war in Vietnam than he's said about how he'd spend four years waging war with people who want nothing more than to kill Americans in large numbers. That's my big problem with Kerry, and judging by the polls it's a problem that a lot of other people have, too.
J. Scott Applewhite / AP
Kristen Breitweiser, right, whose husband Ron died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks at the World Trade Center, joins Mary Fetchet of New Canaan, Conn., who lost her son Brad in the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, Stephen Push of Washington, who heads Families of September 11, and whose wife died on American Airlines Flight 77.
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Whenever people point this out, the Kerry campaign charges them with "politicizing" 9/11. I don't think so. I think it's a matter of priorities, not politicization. But if that's what it is, so be it. Better to politicize it, than to ignore it, or forget it. Or, as some people even want us to, lose it.
Here's what Lee Harris wrote, in his book Civilization And Its Enemies:
Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.
...
They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.
They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn't done enough for -- yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part -- something that we could correct. And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means.
The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason -- it is his reason, and not ours.
Too many people have forgotten that. Or worse, they've decided that the real enemy is George W. Bush, even to the point of desecrating 9/11 memorials with anti-Bush slogans.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3395977/