America Agonistes

Ten years gone since 9/11.Ten years.

A mere decade after 3,000 Americans were murdered in the worst attack on our soil in history, 9/11 has become a minor commemoration, something like Flag Day, an occasion for politicians to make a few speeches. In another decade, it may not even be that much.

Among those politicians is the mayor of the city where 9/11 actually occurred, Mayor Bloomberg, and it's worth listening to what he had to say about excluding clergy and the firemen and police who first confronted the horror on that grim, dark day from the ceremony:



Putting aside his ignorance of the Constitution, it's strange indeed to hear someone who champions building a mega-mosque virtually on the site of Ground Zero and helped ram it through the zoning board talk about how having clergy to commemorate 9/11 is somehow inappropriate. Especially when that mosque is essentially being funded by the same people that funded the 9/11 attacks, with an imam in charge who says the US was an 'accessory' to the atrocity perpetrated on our soil and who wants to implement sharia law in our Republic.

And it's even stranger to hear him talk about there being no room to accommodate the firemen and police. As I recall, there was plenty of room for them on the same site ten years ago...and a number of them never left.

It's somehow symbolic that ten years later Ground Zero is still a building site, deeply mired in New York City's bureaucracy. It remains unfinished business, just like the war it precipitated.

Because that's the core of the matter. We responded, but our response was incomplete, which is exactly why we're still fighting this war a decade later.

It started when President Bush first addressed Congress and the nation after 9/11.

The American people were ready to be led to war as a united country to take retribution on the enemies who perpetrated 9/11, and their friends pulling the strings back home in the Middle East.

Unfortunately, some of those same people were long time friends and business partners of the Bush family and their friends, which made things awkward - to say the least.

So instead of actually naming our enemies and their ideology - Islamist fascism - the president announced that America was now involved in a war on 'terror', that we should all calm down, that the creed of our enemies meant peace, that the goal of this war was `safety and security' rather than victory, and that everything would be all right if we would just go shopping.

Since then, virtually every part of the war was fought in half measures. President Bush said to Congress a week or so after 9/11 : "We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime."

That should have been our guiding principle in winning this war. But instead, that standard was applied so selectively as to be almost meaningless in terms of victory.

It meant that we were willing to send an army to landlocked Afghanistan to fight the Taliban when they refused to turn their backs on al-Qaeda, but it meant we had to spend billions to bribe Pakistan and ignore their harboring of our enemies and the Islamist terrorist groups there.

It meant spending billions on security but not securing our borders or taking measures to deal with Islamist Muslim Brotherhood fronts here at home.

It meant invading Iraq, (which was about protecting the Saudis anyway) but ignoring countries like Syria and Saudi Arabia who were allowing funding, training and transit of al-Qaeda fighters to kill our men there. And it meant doing almost nothing about Iran allowing al-Qaeda fighters to transit their borders or arming and training the Shi'ite militias fighting our troops.

And most of all, it meant was appeasing Islam at all costs.

Both the Bush and Obama Administrations somehow got the idea that by concealing whom and what we we were actually fighting, there was a public relations battle to be won in the Muslim world.

We were fighting al-Qaeda, 'extremists', 'terrorists', 'radicals', what have you. Anything except what we were really fighting, the ideology of Islamist fascism.

Over the past decade Americans have been sent a barely concealed message that somehow 9/11 was our fault because we were somehow unaccepting and insufficiently subservient to the issues and concerns of Islam.

Appeasement became the order of the day.

That meant Muslim Brotherhood front groups like CAIR being embraced by our government as legitimate players and spokespersons for America's Muslims, the nation enduring a virtual media self-flagellation over Guantanamo and Abu Ghreib, US ambassadors being appointed to the anti-Semitic and Islamist Organization of Islamic Councils 'to listen and to learn', and our troops in the field being saddled with unrealistic rules of engagement that actually endangered their lives.

It meant 'engaging' with countries like Iran and Syria while they committed blatant acts of war and terrorism against us, and indulging in the fiction that what really caused our problems with the Muslim world was American support for Israel and the lack of a 'Palestine'.

It meant talking fervently about 'Arab Democracy' and the problem of 'Islamophobia' while ignoring the Muslim world's anti-semitism, bigotry and and misogyny. It meant spending millions on Iraqi democracy while allowing that 'democratic' government we put in place to conduct a jihad on Christians and homosexuals on our watch.

It meant turning a blind eye to the real perpetrators, the nations that fund, harbor and nurture jihad against the West. It meant not even allowing them to be sued in court for monetary damages. Or even prosecuting some of our enemies who have been taken in battle after killing our warriors.

It meant threatening a Navy SEAL team with courtmartials for carrying out a dangerous mission to apprehend the terrorist who murdered five civilian contractors in Fallujah and mutilated their corpses, but allowing someone like Major Nidal to stay in the Army and advance through the ranks until he decided to carry out his own personal jihad that morning in Fort Hood.

In short, it meant fighting a war by half measures and deceiving ourselves.

From the beginning, we've been told that `this is a new kind of war' without borders or real enemies. But anyone who is paying any attention at all knows exactly where the support network of jihad is located. And exactly where to find our enemies. As Mark Steyn once memorably put it, they are hiding in plain sight.

But we have allowed ourselves to be lulled into not seeing, and even told that seeing the truth for what it is somehow shameful.

And so we remain America Agonistes, embattled but not defeated. Because no one can defeat us except ourselves.

Americans don't like wasteful wars of defensive attrition with no end in sight, and they historically have a limited tolerance for being lied to. On this 9/11, when political apes like Mayor Bloomberg posture and preen and the current occupant of the White House repeats smarmy platitudes and avoids the truth because of his own mindset and prejudices, I get a real sense that the time of lies and misdirection is coming to an end. Because there is no other choice, and America is not a suicidal country. And because unfortunately, appeasement never leads to peace. Only victory does that.

As I write this, I have no doubt that we will remember it and act on it, although it may be that circumstances force us to remember it. History is never kind to those with unfinished business.

One of my clearest memories of 9/11 happened in the evening. After letting all of the day's horror sink in, I walked outside to get some air and look at the sky, an old habit of mine. Up above was a crescent moon with stars nearby...the living picture of Islam ascendent.

It's something I've never forgotten.

The moon, like all else on this earth goes in phases. I sense the beginning of a new phase.

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