http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson091102.asp
September 11, 2002 8:00 a.m.
The Wages of September 11
There is no going back.
September 11 changed our world. Those who deny such a watershed event take a
superficially short-term view, and seem to think all is as before simply
because the sun still rises and sets.
This is a colossal misjudgment. The collapse of the towers, the crashing
into the Pentagon, and the murder of 3,000 Americans — all seen live in real
time by millions the world over — tore off a scab and exposed deep wounds,
which, if and when they heal, will leave ugly scars for decades. The killers
dealt in icons — the choice of 911 as the date of death, targeting the
manifest symbols of global capitalism and American military power, and
centering their destruction on the largest Jewish city in the world. Yes,
they got their symbols in spades, but they have no idea that their killing
has instead become emblematic of changes that they could scarcely imagine.
Islamic fundamentalism has proved not ascendant, but static, morally
repugnant — and the worst plague upon the Arab world since the Crusades. By
lurking in the shadows and killing incrementally through stealth, the
vampirish terrorists garnered bribes and subsidies through threats and
bombs; but pale and wrinkled in the daylight after 9/11, they prove only
ghoulish not fearsome.
The more the world knows of al Qaeda and bin Laden, the more it has found
them both vile and yet banal — and so is confident and eager to eradicate
them and all they stand for. It is one thing to kill innocents, quite
another to take on the armed might of an aroused United States. Easily
dodging a solo cruise missile in the vastness of Afghanistan may make good
theater and bring about braggadocio; dealing with grim American and British
commandos who have come 7,000 miles for your head prompts abject flight and
an occasional cheap infomercial on the run. And the ultimate consequence of
the attacks of September 11 will not merely be the destruction of al Qaeda,
but also the complete repudiation of the Taliban, the Iranian mullocracy,
the plague of the Pakistani madrassas, and any other would-be fundamentalist
paradise on earth.
Foreign relations will not be the same in our generation. Our coalition with
Europe, we learn, was not a partnership, but more mere alphabetic
nomenclature and the mutual back scratching of Euro-American globetrotters —
a paper alliance without a mission nearly 15 years after the end of the Cold
War. The truth is that Europe, out of noble purposes, for a decade has
insidiously eroded its collective national sovereignty in order to craft an
antidemocratic EU, a 80,000-person fuzzy bureaucracy whose executive power
is as militarily weak as it is morally ambiguous in its reliance on often
dubious international accords. This sad realization September 11 brutally
exposed, and we all should cry for the beloved continent that has for the
moment completely lost its moral bearings. Indeed, as the months progressed
the problems inherent in "the European way" became all too apparent:
pretentious utopian manifestos in lieu of military resoluteness, abstract
moralizing to excuse dereliction of concrete ethical responsibility, and
constant American ankle-biting even as Europe lives in a make-believe Shire
while we keep back the forces of Mordor from its picturesque borders, with
only a few brave Frodos and Bilbos tagging along. Nothing has proved more
sobering to Americans than the skepticism of these blinkered European
hobbits after September 11.
America learned that "moderate" Arab countries are as dangerous as hostile
Islamic nations. After September 11, being a Saudi, Egyptian, or Kuwaiti
means nothing special to an American — at least not proof of being any more
friendly or hostile than having Libyan, Syrian, or Lebanese citizenship.
Indeed, our entire postwar policy of propping up autocracies on the triad of
their anticommunism, oil, and arms purchases — like NATO — belongs to a
pre-9/11 age of Soviet aggrandizement and petroleum monopolies. Now we learn
that broadcasting state-sponsored hatred of Israel and the United States is
just as deadly to our interests as scud missiles — and as likely to come
from friends as enemies. Worst-case scenarios like Iran and Afghanistan
offer more long-term hope than "stable regimes" like the Saudis; governments
that hate us have populations that like us — and vice versa; the Saudi royal
family, whom 5,000 American troops protect, and the Mubarak autocracy, which
has snagged billions of American dollars, are as afraid of democratic
reformers as they are Islamic fundamentalists. And with good reason: Islamic
governments in Iran and under the Taliban were as hated by the masses as
Arab secular reformers in exile in the West are praised and championed.
The post-9/11 domestic calculus is just as confusing. Generals and the
military brass call civilians who seek the liberation of Iraq "chicken
hawks" and worse. Yet such traditional Vietnam-era invective I think rings
hollow after September 11, and sounds more like McClellan's shrillness
against his civilian overseers who precipitously wanted an odious slavery
ended than resonant of Patton's audacity in charging after murderous Nazis.
More Americans were destroyed at work in a single day than all those
soldiers killed in enemy action since the evacuation of Vietnam nearly 30
years ago. Indeed, most troops who went through the ghastly inferno of
Vietnam are now in or nearing retirement; and, thank God, there is no
generation of Americans in the present military — other than a few thousand
brave veterans of the Gulf, Mogadishu, and Panama — who have been in
sustained and deadly shooting with heavy casualties. Because American
soldiers and their equipment are as impressive as our own domestic security
is lax, in this gruesome war it may well be more perilous to work high up in
lower Manhattan, fly regularly on a jumbo jet, or handle mail at the
Pentagon or CIA than be at sea on a sub or destroyer.
Real concern for the sanctity of life may hinge on employing rather than
rejecting force, inasmuch as our troops are as deadly and protected abroad
as our women, children, aged, and civilians are impotent and vulnerable at
home. It seems to me a more moral gamble to send hundreds of pilots into
harm's way than allow a madman to further his plots to blow up or infect
thousands in high-rises.
Politics have been turned upside down. In the old days, cynical
conservatives were forced to hold their noses and to practice a sometimes
repellent Realpolitik. In the age of Russian expansionism, they were loathe
to champion democracy when it might usher in a socialist Trojan Horse whose
belly harbored totalitarians disguised as parliamentarians. Thus they were
so often at loggerheads with naïve and idealist leftists.
No longer. The end of the specter of a deadly and aggressive Soviet
Communism has revived democratic ideology as a force in diplomacy. Champions
of freedom no longer sigh and back opportunistic rightist thugs who promise
open economics, loot their treasuries, and keep out the Russians. Instead,
even reactionaries are now more likely to push for democratic governments in
the Middle East than are dour and skeptical leftists. The latter, if
multiculturalists, often believe that democracy is a value-neutral Western
construct, not necessarily a universal good; if pacifists, they claim
nonintervention, not justice, as their first priority. The Right, not the
Left, now is the greater proponent of global freedom, liberation, and
idealism — with obvious domestic ramifications for any Republican president
astute enough to tap that rich vein of popular support.
All this and more are the wages of the disaster of September 11 and the
subsequent terrible year — and yet it is likely that, for good or evil, we
will see things even more incredible in the twelve months ahead.