The Terrorists Won
As soon as the horrors of September 11th, 2001 subsided to the point that I could pay attention to any leader besides Rudolph Giuliani I remember that I started to hear my government tell me ways that I, an average citizen, could stop the terrorists from winning. First, I was supposed to not be afraid. I didn’t want to terrorists to win, so I tried to pretend I wasn’t afraid. Then, at some point, I was supposed to be very very afraid of everything (I think the word they used was “vigilant”). Dutifully, I even called in an abandoned suitcase I spotted, seeing past the clever scheme of “abandoning” an incendiary device in a dumpster of all places. Eventually, not letting the terrorist win morphed into taking airplane flights again, and then that turned into not complaining when the airline industry treated me like diseased cattle and relegated “on time departure” to the stuff dreams are made of. Oh, and I shopped, because terrorists just can’t stand it when I buy knick-knacks on E-Bay. They hate that more than they hate our freedoms. Which is lucky, because we don’t really have those anymore, since you know, if the government can’t spy on me whenever they want, the terrorists win.
At some point when I was singing God Bless America at a ballgame with my shoes off and a wire tap in my vas deferens it occurred to me that the terrorists won, they won a long time ago, and everything that our government has done since 9/11 has only increased their margin of victory. However, as much as we might weep for nightmare America has become, we have to realize that the terrorist victory has little to do with the draconian measures America has visited on her own people.
To see the scope of the terrorist victory we need to tie together two true statements that we know about the world: “War is politics by other means” (Carl Von Clausewitz) and “All politics is local” (fmr. Speaker Tip O’Neill). 9/11 was a stratagem. Osama Bin Laden is not some kind of James Bond villain trying to hold the world hostage for billions of dollars from his volcanic lair. He’s a zealot who had clear goals in mind when he launched his dread plan. One of those goals was to kill as many Americans as possible, but he had a reason for those murders. That reason was not, as our leaders would have us believe, motiveless malevolence. If he started a “war” there must have been a political motivation behind it, and that political motivation probably has much more to do with what is going on in his part of the world than ours. If we are going to judge whether or not the terrorists win, we have to understand what winning looks like to them.
Clear as I can see, Bin Laden wanted to do two things: weaken American resolve in supporting the “moderate” regimes we prop up in the Middle East, and distinguish his organization as the leading outlet for radicals across the region. You don’t sit there with four flying bombs and think that you can arrange them is such a way as to topple the most powerful nation on earth. Bin Laden doesn’t want to destroy America nearly as much as he wants to destroy Israel. He couldn’t hope to become the Supreme Ruler of America, instead his fantasized about becoming the Supreme Ruler of Afghanistan, and Iran, and Iraq, and ultimately, his homeland, the religious center for his people, Saudi Arabia. America, as much as any single force, stood in his way. We provided the legitimacy (to say nothing of funding, and oftentimes direct military armament) for the kind of coca-cola drinking Muslim regimes that Bin Laden could not stand. To his mind, America’s interference in the region suppresses the will of the people, people he believes would rise up and erect radical Islamic States if America went into an isolationist shell. He wanted to kill as many Americans as possible because he believed (as almost every single military opponent this “union” has ever faced) that Americans have no stomach for body bags; that once something costs us more than money, we’ll retreat to the safety that two oceans provide.
His second goal is evident in his choice of targets. You could probably kill more people by flying planes into packed sporting arenas. However, the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, the Capitol Dome, these are all symbols of American economic, military, and social power. By striking out at these symbols Al Qaeda sent a message to every would-be radical out there: this organization is a lot more than talk. These are guys that are out there “doing” something, fighting something, generally causing pain directly to the biggest bully in the schoolyard. If you’re a young radical looking to martyr yourself, would you rather take out 50 schoolchildren on a bus, or take out the American military epicenter? That is the message that Bin Laden wanted to send, not to Americans, but to those who were already sympathetic to the general cause of fundamentalist revolution.
To steal a phrase from President Bush … Mission Accomplished. The terrorists won the minute even one of those planes found its mark. The entire Middle East is radically destabilized and Al Qaeda has risen to such a level that Hamass looks like Uncle Toms by comparison. That would have been bad enough, but America’s reaction in the aftermath has let the terrorists exceed their goals beyond their wildest imagination.
Going to war in Iraq is unquestionably the stupidest thing done by any nation state since the end of the cold war. Bin Laden was hoping that America would back off propping up Middle Eastern regimes because he couldn’t have hoped that America would be so stupid as to attack a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and proactively destabilize the entire region. Its not just that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein aren’t the same person (I honestly picture republicans just waiting for Saddam to pull a Scooby-Doo and reveal that he was Osama Bin Laden all along) its that the two people were in opposition to each other. Saddam (like every other dictator) wanted absolute power absolutely. Bin Laden wanted to take that power away from him so that a fundamentalist Islamic regime could rise and take his place. But Bin Laden didn’t have the power to take on Saddam directly, only America could remove the biggest obstacle to fundamentalist control of Iraq … and we did. In so doing, we put immense political pressure on every single one of our “allies” in the region. Every single government in the region has to distance themselves from the American invaders and cut hard towards their radical flank, just to stay in power. If we keep this up, those regimes will fall, and I guarantee that the rabid America hating replacement regimes will be a constant problem for us for decades to come. This, of course, was exactly what Bin Laden hoped to achieve indirectly through 9/11, but President Jackass went on and played right into his hands. Fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here? Are you kidding me? The only thing we are killing over there is the last façade that America is anything other than an international bully who can’t distinguish a mosque from a bunker. America’s response to 9/11 has given the radical movement the kind of legitimacy in the Muslim world that the IRA needed a century to accrue.
If you are one of those people who can not clearly see how this war has turned Iraq into a most fertile recruitment and training ground that swells the number of worldwide terrorists at an exponential rate, I would like you to donate all of your organs to someone who can use them. Seriously, get out of my country; you are screwing it up for the rest of us. For every terrorist (and at some point, we are going to have to start calling them guerilla warriors) five more rise to take their place, anybody who tells you differently is a liar or a lackey.
The terrorists won their battle. There is nothing we can do about that now. All we can do is stop losing. Fighting in Iraq is America volunteering to continue losing. It is time for America to get up off the mat and start winning the battles worth fighting. There is still a big gaping hole in downtown Manhattan. That is a battle that we could be winning that we aren’t even fighting right now. Our message should be “You want to knock down our buildings, fine, we’re going to build the right back up, this time bigger, higher, stronger. Knock them down again, and we’ll build them right back.” That is how America shows resolve. God Bless America? Enough of that, there’s no crying in baseball. Spreading our resources so thin that we are vulnerable to attacks from God? Not in America buddy. In America we are not overcome by nature, we overcome nature.
I want my country back. I want to live in a place where freedom rings, not fear. Where merit triumphs over mediocrity. Where we might be beaten, but never ever defeated. Terrorists won a battle, we don’t have to give them the war.