Continuing the theme that Michael van der Galien brought to the fore with his post “Why ‘Pre- and Post-9/11’ Should Be Banned From Vocabulary“, here is what I wrote at my weblog Random Fate on September 11, 2004 regarding how perceptions and NOT reality changed on September 11, 2001:
September 11, 2004 –
Some thoughts… on lessons learned and now apparently lostThe world did not change on September 11, 2001. What changed was the perception of the world held by the average American. This is an important difference that has gotten lost in all of the sound and fury over the election, the “War on Terror”, and the sniping between the radical left and the radical right.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, the vast majority of Americans had only a superficial understanding of the world outside North America, when they bothered thinking about anything outside of the United States at all. For the decade before September 11, 2001, the United States did nothing to create the hatred that was manifested by the murders committed on that day. That hatred existed long before, was reared by the progenitors of a radical philosophy not unlike what has been seen many times in history, and continues to be nurtured by those same leaders and their successors. The followers have only a superficial understanding of the world outside of their own community, and that perception is distorted by both ignorance and the rage arising from feeling helpless. The truth is that they are not helpless, but that they are not willing to take responsibility for where they are. The truth also is that they have no true leaders willing to teach that responsibility and to lead them out of their self-induced poverty. Instead, they follow the leaders who blame others for their woes and offer a chance to strike back against those they blame.The world did not change on September 11, 2001. What changed was the perception of the world held by the average American, but since that terrible day the world has changed, and not for the better. Unless the nature of those changes and the reasons underlying them are understood, America runs the risk of not only losing more lives, both of soldiers and at home, but also of losing the war we now find ourselves waging.
On the morning of September 11, 2004, the vast majority of Americans still only have a superficial understanding of the world outside of North America, when they bother trying to understand anything outside of the United States instead of simply reacting with fear towards the unknown. In the three years since September 11, 2001, the United States has engaged in one war directly linked to the murders committed on that day. That war has nearly been forgotten in the shadows cast by a second war that was justified using several reasons, and the shadows darken because the apparent clarity of those reasons has become muddied as time passes and more blood is spilled. Today, atrocity builds upon atrocity in a spiral of escalating horror because each barbarity numbs our souls more and our enemies need to keep the terror alive to feed their insatiable lust for vengeance.
Since what happened 35 years ago in the context of the Vietnam War is apparently more politically current than what is to be done now to fight the war we are in now, we should at least recall that war was lost not on the battlefield but in the United States itself. The divisions inside the nation forced the politicians to change policy in such a way that abandoned South Vietnam and effectively lost the war. As Napoleon said, the moral is to the physical as three is to one. The United States is now as divided as it was during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Regardless of who wins the election in 2004, the administration that follows needs to explain to the entire citizenry of the United States the nature of the war we are now in, the larger war, not just the Iraq War, why this larger war needs to be fought, and how it can be won. We cannot win the war as a nation divided the way we are now. A leadership that consists of preaching to the choir the rosy scenarios of a democratic domino effect in the MidEast is not true leadership, and it worse than whistling in the dark. Unfortunately that is what I have seen in the past three years.
The moral is to the physical as three is to one. We applied this in birthing our nation. The Founders in fighting the American Revolution never had the resources to defeat the British Empire. George Washington lost many more battles than he won. Independence was gained only when the British no longer had the will to fight to keep control of the rebellious colonies.
The moral is to the physical as three is to one. That should have been proven to us on September 11, 2001, where the efforts of 19 murdered thousands and terrorized millions. We will not win the war we are now waging by “nuking ’em till they glow,” nor will we win it solely through other military means. In Vietnam, we won every battle, but we never destroyed the will of our enemy to fight. We run the same risk now if we do not attack our enemies in ways that destroy their will to fight, to sacrifice, and to die. We are not making these efforts to understand the weaknesses of what motivates our enemies, and we are not defeating the motivation that drives them to attack us. Until we do this, we are on the path to losing this war.
UPDATE: From Mark Helprin, an article that better states the point I try to make above. Read the whole thing, published by The Wall Street Journal at OpinionJournal:
We have followed a confusion of war aims that seem to report after the fact what we have done rather than to direct what we do. We could, by threatening the existence of Middle Eastern regimes, which live to hold power, enforce our insistence that the Arab world eradicate the terrorists within its midst. Instead, we have embarked upon the messianic transformation of an entire region, indeed an entire civilization, in response to our inability to pacify even a single one of its countries. As long as our war aims stray from the disciplined, justifiable, and attainable objective of self-defense, we will be courting failure.
Our strategy has been deeply inadequate especially in light of the fact that we have refused to build up our forces even as our aims have expanded to the point of absurdity. We might have based in northern Saudi Arabia within easy range of the key regimes that succor terrorism, free to coerce their cooperation by putting their survival in question. Our remounted infantry would have been refreshed, reinforced, properly supported, unaffected by insurgency, and ready to strike. The paradigm would have shifted from conquer, occupy, fail, and withdraw–to strike, return, and re-energize. At the same time, we would not have solicited challenges, as we do now, from anyone who sees that although we may be occupying Iraq, Iraq is also occupying us.
We have abstained from mounting an effective civil defense. Only a fraction of a fraction of our wealth would be required to control the borders of and entry to our sovereign territory, and not that much more to discover, produce, and stockpile effective immunizations, antidotes, and treatments in regard to biological and chemical warfare. Thirty years ago the entire country had been immunized against smallpox. Now, no one is, and the attempt to cover a minuscule part of the population failed miserably and was abandoned. Not only does this state of affairs leave us vulnerable to a smallpox epidemic, it stimulates the terrorists to bring one about. So with civil aviation, which, despite the wreckage and tragedy of September 11, is protected in an inefficient, irresponsible, and desultory fashion.
…
Neither the 9/11 commission, the president, nor the Democratic nominee has a clear vision of how to fight and defend in this war. Partly this is because so many Americans do not yet feel, as some day they may, the gravity of what we are facing.
Three years on, that is where we stand: our strategy shiftless, reactive, irrelevantly grandiose; our war aims undefined; our preparations insufficient; our civil defense neglected; our polity divided into support for either a hapless and incompetent administration that in a parliamentary system would have been turned out long ago, or an opposition so used to appeasement of America’s rivals, critics, and enemies that they cannot even do a credible job of pretending to be resolute.
Will it take more atrocities, more mass-murders committed within the borders of the United States to wake up BOTH the left-wing and right-wing from their mutual fantasies of destroying their political opponents to see the true enemy?
note: The next to the last paragraph in the quoted passages above was edited to add “9/11” to the sentence beginning “Neither the commission, the president…” for clarity.
Little has changed in the two years since this was written.