In the Shadow of 9/11, the Terrorists were Half Right.
By Justin Darr (09/11/05)
The time has come for America to face the grim reality that international terrorists and Osama bin Laden may understand our society far better than we ever gave them credit. Perhaps even better than ourselves.
In the aftermath of 9/11, we looked back on Osama bin Laden’s, “Declaration of War Against the Americans for Occupying the Land of Two Holy Places,” as the ranting of a mad man. We ridiculed bin Laden’s assumptions that America could not defeat him because we were a soft, decadent, society that lacked the resolve to fight a protracted conflict against a small but dedicated foe. We viewed Bin Laden’s statements that, “The extent of your impotence and weakness became very clear,” in the wake of our withdrawal from Somalia, and Clinton’s appearing “in front of the whole world promising revenge, but these threats were merely a preparation for withdrawal,” as a fatal miscalculation. This was New York City, not Mogadishu.
Bin Laden had hit America at home. Regular Americans who had gone to work with no stresses other than being on time for the 9 am meeting and where to go for lunch, ended their mornings by jumping to their deaths to escape the flames of the World Trade Center. We rationalized that Bin Laden might have been right in the past, but that was when he was just blowing up foreign embassies and American warships. Now, he had gone too far and would face the full power of the United States and the American people defending their own.
Four years later, we have to look back at Bin Laden saying, “Your problem will be how to convince your troops to fight,” and realize that he was half right.
America is not having a problem with convincing its troops to fight, but convincing its politically liberal citizens to let them fight. The initial resolve of the American left to stand up against international terrorism has since faded into endless complaints of the War taking too long, our inability to stop a group of psychopaths from killing innocent civilians in accordance with an arbitrarily predetermined time table, and raw hatred for the men and women in uniform fighting and dying to protect us.
The left’s disingenuous veneer of supporting the troops and protecting American civilians has gradually flaked away to where we are today with fringe groups protesting wounded American soldiers in their hospital beds, and desecrating the memory of the victims of 9/11 by perverting the memorial at the World Trade Center into a multicultural monstrosity.
This is what Bin Laden wants and has been expecting. From the beginning, he knew all he had to do was hide in a cave, send out a propaganda video every now and again, tap radical Islam’s seemingly endless supply of lunatics willing to blow themselves up so they can get to their 70 virgins, and eventually the left would lose interest in the War, get depressed that it was not quite easy enough for their weak stomachs, and start destroying America from within.
Bin Laden was right about America as far as its leftist fringe is concerned. They are decadent, they are soft, they are fickle, and they are so disassociated with reality that they are willing to place the safety of their fellow citizens at risk by basing policy on what they want to be the truth rather than what is.
The left’s answer to any problem is to give up. If people refuse to live a moral lifestyle or practice contraception, have abortion on demand, if students cannot read, lower the standards, if people do not have the skills to get good jobs, put them on welfare for life, and if your enemies in a War decide to fight, surrender.
Luckily, America has another half. These are the Americans who won World War II, the Cold War, and made America the richest, most powerful nation in history. Resolve, perseverance, and determination are intrinsic to their character and do not evaporate away like dust in the face of adversity. They have formed the backbone of our nation from its founding, and now they are all that is left holding it up.
Bin Laden is hoping the left continues its pattern of treating common sense with sarcasm, distorting the truth for political gain, silencing dissent with claims of insensitivity. This is his only hope of victory over America. This is the only thing separating him from us.
© 2005 Justin Darr
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