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Townhall...
Myth
and Reality After 9/11
By Victor Davis Hanson
9/8/2011
Why
did radical Islamic terrorists
kill almost 3,000 Americans a decade ago?
Few
still believe the old myth that
prior U.S. foreign policy or support for Israel logically earned us
Osama bin
Laden’s wrath. After all, the U.S. throughout the 1990s had saved
Islamic
peoples from Bosnia and Kosovo to Somalia and Kuwait. Russia and China,
in
contrast, had oppressed or killed tens of thousands of their own
Muslims without
much fear of provoking al Qaeda.
Moreover,
thousands of Arabs have been
killed recently, but by their own Libyan and Syrian governments, not
Israeli
Defense Forces. Al Qaeda still issues death threats to Americans even
though
its original pretexts for going to war -- such as U.S. troops stationed
in
Saudi Arabia -- were long ago irrelevant.
Instead,
on this 10-year anniversary
of 9/11, no one has yet refuted the general truth that bin Laden tried
to
hijack popular Arab discontent over endemic poverty and self-induced
misery. In
cynical Hitlerian fashion, al Qaeda’s propagandists sought to blame the
mess of
the Arab Middle East on Jews and foreigners, rather than seeking to
address
homegrown corrupt kleptocracies, inefficient statism, indigenous
tribalism,
gender apartheid, and religious fundamentalism and intolerance.
Past
Western appeasement of terrorism
only convinced the manipulative bin Laden that he might kill Westerners
without
much fear of retaliation, as he presented himself to the Islamic Street
as the
new Saladin who had humbled the Western infidel.
Another
post-9/11 myth assured us that
George W. Bush foolishly squandered a rare national unity by enacting
unlawful
and unnecessary homeland security measures, and starting wasteful and
unwinnable
wars. The myth seems to suggest that if only we had not gone into Iraq
or
opened Guantanamo, we would still be at peace and, Left and Right,
flying
American flags from our cars’ antennas.
But
we know that theory is largely a
fable for two reasons. From 2001 to 2008, almost every domestic and
foreign
security expert assured us that the next 9/11 was not a matter of “if,”
but
only of “when.” Yet 10 years later there has not been a single
comparable
terrorist attack, despite dozens of foiled efforts to shoot and blow up
Americans. What happened?
The
Patriot Act, renditions,
tribunals, preventive detention, new bothersome security measures and
the use
of Predator drones have all weakened al Qaeda and have made it
difficult to
attack Americans at home. For all the acrimony over Afghanistan and
Iraq, tens
of thousands of jihadists were killed abroad, and consensual
governments that
fight terrorists still survive in place of dictatorships.
And
where now are the likes of Michael
Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Moveon.org, Code Pink and the entire antiwar
movement
that for years dominated the news, assuring us that we had lost our
freedoms at
home and caused only mayhem abroad?
The
truth is, they mostly dropped out
of the news when Barack Obama was elected president. Apparently these
loud
megaphones had all along been more interested in partisan politics than
principled criticism. In one of the strangest turnabouts in modern
political
history, fierce antiwar and anti-administration critic Barack Obama,
upon
taking up the office of the presidency, either embraced or expanded
almost all
of the Bush-Cheney antiterrorism policies.
Read
the rest of the column at
Townhall
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