Eleven Years of the Same Mistake - Still not calling the enemy the enemy!

With each passing year the scenes of horror that I witnessed that day get harder and harder to watch.

Eleven Years of the Same Mistake | FrontPage Magazine
by Bruce Thornton Bio ↓ on Sep 11th, 2012

Eleven years ago today America was violently awakened to the fact that it was at war. The attacks of 9/11 were the latest gruesome assault in the long conflict between the West and Islam, a war most Americans didn’t know was being waged, a war that had been going on for 14 centuries. Yet for the following eleven years, America’s response to this war has been compromised by the serial violation of Sun Tzu’s dictum, “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” Eleven years on, we still haven’t taken an accurate measure of the enemy who wants to destroy us.

The ruins in New York were still smoking as the preposterous explanations for the murders started pouring forth, most of them marked by what Andrew McCarthy calls “willful blindness” not just to the doctrines of Islam that motivated al Qaeda, but to our own unexamined assumptions and received wisdom. Of course, the left blamed America for the attacks, professors blaming the “terrorism” of the first Gulf War, or the “millions of victims of American imperialism,” or the “fascism of U.S. foreign policy over the past many decades.” Support for Israel was another spurious cause of jihadist violence, even though bin Laden himself cited the dissolution of the Ottoman caliphate, not the creation of Israel, as the most important “disaster” that led to the 9/11 payback.

More common in the mainstream media were the various psychological explanations that reflected the modern secularist view of religion as a Marxian “opiate” or a Freudian “illusion,” compensation for a lack of jobs or political freedom. The New York Times editorialized that “the disappointed youth of Egypt and Saudi Arabia turn to religion for comfort” for their lack of economic opportunity or political participation. Bill Clinton, on whose watch al Qaeda and bin Laden were allowed to proliferate and attack America with impunity, trotted out the antique progressive fingering of “poverty” as the motive for jihadist violence: “The forces of reaction feed on disillusionment, poverty, and despair.” Such reductive psychologizing was a favorite of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, the Delphic oracle of received wisdom, who claimed that economic inferiority and lack of development in Middle Eastern states caused “dissonance and humiliation” that “produces lashing out,” as though the jihadists were teenaged juvenile delinquents with low esteem. Ignored in all these analyses were the numerous jihadist tracts that legitimized their attacks with appeals to 14 centuries of Islamic theology and jurisprudence.

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