9/11

I thought about today a lot, beginning sometime yesterday afternoon and lasting well into the wee small hours of this morning. Five years. It’s not that long a time, yet it is. I’ve read what the pundits have to say about this anniversary and I find most of what’s been said to be lacking both in substance and meaning. And I cannot find words of my own, words that are adequate, words that express the full range of my emotions, words that express sorrow and, at the same time, express the resolve to persevere, the resolve to win this existential conflict.

I did read one op-ed that resonated with me. I’ll give you the final two paragraphs of Christopher Hitchen’s essay in today’s WSJ:

One must have a blunt answer to the banal chat-show and op-ed question: What have we learned? (The answer ought not to be that we have learned how to bully and harass citizens who try to take shampoo on flights on which they have lawfully booked passage. Yet incompetent collective punishment of the innocent, and absurd color-coding of the "threat level," is the way in which most Americans actually experience the "war on terror.") Anyone who lost their "innocence" on September 11 was too naïve by far, or too stupid to begin with. On that day, we learned what we ought to have known already, which is that clerical fanaticism means to fight a war which can only have one victor. Afghans, Kurds, Kashmiris, Timorese and many others could have told us this from experience, and for nothing (and did warn us, especially in the person of Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance). Does anyone suppose that an ideology that slaughters and enslaves them will ever be amenable to "us"? The first duty, therefore, is one of solidarity with bin-Ladenism's other victims and targets, from India to Kurdistan.

The second point makes me queasy, but cannot be ducked. "We"--and our allies--simply have to become more ruthless and more experienced. An unspoken advantage of the current awful strife in Iraq and Afghanistan is that it is training tens of thousands of our young officers and soldiers to fight on the worst imaginable terrain, and gradually to learn how to confront, infiltrate, "turn," isolate and kill the worst imaginable enemy. These are faculties that we shall be needing in the future. It is a shame that we have to expend our talent in this way, but it was far worse five years and one day ago, when the enemy knew that there was a war in progress, and was giggling at how easy the attacks would be, and "we" did not even know that hostilities had commenced. Come to think of it, perhaps we were a bit "innocent" after all.

Indeed.

Update 9/11/2006, 1440 hours: When I said “I’ve read what the pundits have to say about this anniversary and I find most of what’s been said to be lacking…” I meant op-eds and essays by the professional pundits, i.e., those that are paid to write. There’s much good out there in the ‘sphere, and Lori Byrd, writing at Wizbang, provides the best compendium of links I’ve seen today. The woman is awesome.