Now, on the eighth anniversary of the assault, the world has changed almost beyond belief — even if many circumstances that led to the attack on America have not. The Taliban regime and Saddam are still gone. Democracies still function in their place. America remains safe from attack. Yet rarely do we credit anyone for such facts.
Indeed, we are now in a post-9/11 sort of limbo. On the one hand, popular culture, the Democratic Party, the Democratic-led Congress, and Barack Obama have at various times denied the utility or morality of Guantanamo, elements of the Patriot Act, rendition, military tribunals, Predator attacks, or the conduct and very necessity of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The new post-9/11 narrative is not so much that a radical fringe of fundamentalist Muslims had established nefarious relationships of mutual interest and benefit with Middle Eastern dictatorships in order to terrorize Western targets, but that an insensitivity and chauvinism on the part of the United States had driven proud Muslims through desperation and angst into Islam’s radical fringes.
And the mainstream media think it would inflame the public to show any pictures or video of the Twin Towers as if the real danger is that someone might get angry about a terrorist attack that killed 3000 of our fellow citizens. Well, I think it's important to remember how it felt on that day. Did anyone think we could make it through eight years without another attack? The Bush administration may have gotten a lot of things wrong, but they did something right in fighting the war on terror. It's not over just because we're tired of it. We know there's more to do.
Never forget.
No comments:
Post a Comment