http://www.rockfordinstitute.org/News/Trifkovic/News&Views.htm
"ChroniclesExtra" - Thursday, September 13, 2001
A M E R I C AS B L A C K S E
P T E M B E R
by Srdja Trifkovic
The horror in New
York was literally awesome. The Pentagon fire was
almost
a sideshow by comparison, horrible and lethal, but familiar: Weve
seen similar footage from Beirut, Belfast, Baghdad, or
Belgrade. The World
Trade Center was of a different
order of magnitude. The Titanic comes to
mind: an epic
tragedy laden with symbolism, to be dissected by
intellectuals and elaborated by popular culture gurus for decades to
come.
Whatever its motives and its significance this was
a crime against all of
us. Having stated the obvious let
us look at the implications.
THE ENEMY WITHIN:
When every printed page and flickering screen
says "Its
Osama bin Laden!" the normal reaction of any rational person is
to assume that it was someone else. This time, however, it seems that
only
the usual suspect, and others of his peculiar
cultural ilk, combine the
five key ingredients that
produced Americas Black September: (1) the will
and
motive to strike against America; (2) the lack of moral inhibitions
against doing it in that particular manner; (3) the financial
resources;
(4) the logistic and organizational
infrastructure; and, a key criterium,
(5) the fanaticism
of would-be martyrs eager to caress the houris promised
by their Prophet before the day is out.
Already at the time
of the first WTC attack in 1993, it was obvious
that
belligerent Islam had a firm foothold within the Muslim diaspora in
the United States. In the meantime, the demographic deluge has
continued
unabated. By 1998, President Clinton joyfully
announced that "there are
over 1,200 mosques and Islamic
centers in the United States," and that
those "six
million Americans who worship there will tell you there is no
inherent clash between Islam and America." His discovery of
user-friendly
Islam implied that that religion was
tolerant of other beliefs, and
thoroughly "American." In
reality this peculiar creed has been synonymous
with
violence and intolerance since its earliest days. It is both a
religion and an ideology that seek to impose mind-numbing uniformity
of
thought and feeling on its faithful, and to subjugate
and ultimately
destroy all non-believers.
Its adherents
murderous extremism, manifested on September 11,
should
spell the end of another kind of extremism: the stubborn insistence
of the ruling establishment on treating each and every newcomer
as equally
meltable in the pot. They let millions of
people into this country every
year without seriously
asking them who they are and why they are here. The
federal governments refusal to implement a rational immigration
policy
costs lives. Its refusal to accept that certain
ethnic and cultural make
some groups more (or less)
readily assimilable into America than others has
rendered our country incapable of considering reality. An obvious lesson
of
September 11 is that it is necessary to curtail
immigration from the
Islamic world, which fuel diasporas
in both North America and Europe that
allow terrorists
to remain anonymous and untraceable.
RETALIATION: One way
of dealing with anger is to lash out, but the
horror of
New York cannot be assuaged with amber flashes in some
God-forsaken Afghan valley, compliments of the U.S. Air Force. In
the
aftermath of bomb attacks on two East African
embassies in 1998, revenge
proved counter-productive: In
Afghanistan it was ineffective, while in
Sudan it was
misdirected. More importantly, the awful thought is that
retaliation may be ordered and executed by those same people, or
their
cloned heirs, whose actions have caused the
murderous reaction abroad. As
Michael Pierce put it,
nothing could keep his gorge from rising when
General
Wesley Clark began to pontificate about the need for a strong
response: "it was this wretched man who whined loudly that we
hadnt
murdered enough Serbs. Who was overseer of the
ethnic cleansing of Kosovo.
Who armed Islamic terrorists
by the literal tens of thousands . . . Today
we got to
see some Christians a little closer to home, running from burning
buildings that had been hit by terror bombers. Thanks, Wes, we
owe you."
Clark and his ilk do
not know--let alone care for--Thomas Paines
warning that
"sanguinary punishments corrupt mankind." Randomly violent and
indiscriminate revenge in which more innocent civilians will die is
exactly
what the attackers want, and expect. It would be
unworthy of the victims to
strike at anyone but the
verifiable culprits.
CUI BONO? Whoever did
it, the Palestinians are the chief and
immediate losers.
For the first time in decades, despite the lynching of
Israeli conscripts, the shooting of settlers, and the suicide bomb
attacks,
the public sympathy for the Palestinians has
been rising. As Arab teenagers
are shot in the streets
for throwing stones, Israel has been losing the
public
relations battle. This is likely to change. The impression that we
are now in the same boat with Israel is mistaken, but it will
be promoted
nevertheless. Jubilation in the streets of
Nablus and Ramallah at the news
from across the ocean
will prove costly for the Palestinian agenda, at
least
in the short term. The peace process will remain stalled, and ever
more stringent Israeli counter-measures will be approved. The
need for a
new American policy in the Middle East will
be blurred, at least
temporarily.
We have been reminded
that belligerent Islam is the most immediate
and lethal
threat to Americas domestic security and, in the longer term, to
the survival of our civilization. Islam is unable to create a
country fit
for a civilized person to inhabit, but it is
good at destroying others. The
creative response to it
is to avoid the perception of a permanent bias in
Middle
Eastern affairs that breeds anti-Americanism and Islamic
fundamentalism. But above all it is necessary to rethink the U.S. policy
in
the Middle East. American national interests in the
Middle East are
primarily economic: It is vitally
important to the United States to have
permanent access
to secure and affordable sources of energy. It is not
vitally important to the U.S. whose flag flies over the Dome on the
Rock.
We need a stable peace in the Middle East that
should be based on a
scrupulously even-handed treatment
of the conflicting parties claims and
aspirations. The
desirability of any possible solution must be assessed
from the point of clearly defined American geopolitical, economic,
and
diplomatic interests.
ANTHRAX TO COME?
There will be many other lessons of September 11
on
offer from every talking head in the nation. One will be an even
stronger demand for the antimissile shield around America,
regardless of
the obvious fact that death came to New
York and Washington by a more
prosaic and less
predictable route. The key security lesson of last
Tuesdays carnage is that the real threat to the United
States--especially
to its large cities--comes from
terrorism, rather than any "rogue states."
Rich, urban
targets meet determined but cheap attackers. The next attack
may well be biological or chemical rather than nuclear, and the method
of
delivery will be a smuggled suitcase rather than a
ballistic missile. Even
a nuclear device could be
activated on a freighter sailing under the
Verrazano or
Golden Gate Bridge. Missile defense will cost billions, and
will not defend against such threat. If built it will be the most
colossal
exercise in futility in American history, the
wrong response to the wrong
security assessment. If
nine-tenths of the population of a major city dies
of a
biological attack, and some Islamic terrorist group announces a hit
list of a dozen more such targets in North America or Western
Europe, the
folly of missile defense will be obvious
even to Mr. Rumsfeld.
LIMITS OF
INTELLIGENCE: At the technical level, September 11
demonstrates the limits of intelligence gathering even in this
ultra-high-tech age. The U.S. intelligence community is simply
not designed
to counter this kind of attack. Its
fundamental architecture was created
more than 50 years
ago to counter the communist threat. The question is
whether this structure, which has remained largely unchanged for
decades
and remains primarily focused on military
threats, can deal with the
challenge of transnational,
non-state adversaries. Military force and
economic
sanctions may work against state-sponsored terrorism, but to
counter an essentially private operation a new understanding of the
threat
is needed.
BILL OF RIGHTS,
R.I.P? The mind-boggling failure of the U.S.
"intelligence community" to anticipate and prevent last Tuesdays
attacks
will be used by the proponents of further
centralization of the power of
the government. Those
proponents of perpetual war for perpetual peace will
demand expanded controls over the Internet, obligatory e-mail
decoding
devices, and more satellites that monitor us
from the skies. But those
attacks prove yet again that
there is no substitute for human assessments
based on a
thorough understanding of the particular social, cultural, or
historical milieu of the attackers. Human intelligence assets are
needed,
not more electronic gadgetry, to identify,
target, and then destroy the
individuals and
organizations that can, and therefore will strike again.
TIME FOR
INTROSPECTION: At the fundamental level, however,
September 11 shows that the real and present danger is with us now,
and
will remain with us for as long as the United States
remains committed to
the concept of unrestrained
projection of power everywhere in the world. It
is
amazing that no mainstream commentator stated the obvious: people who
wish America ill are not merely "jealous of its power and
wealth," they are
deeply resentful of what they perceive
as Washingtons bullying, arrogance,
criminality even.
"Benevolent global hegemony" will entangle America in
more wars and more lies, and result in more innocent victims at home
and
abroad. It is unconnected to this countrys
interests, at odds with its
tradition, and contrary to
the wishes of the vast majority of its people.
The
paramount lesson of this American tragedy is that the threat to America
exists because of the policy of global hegemony pursued from
Washington.
Designating "threats to national security"
must follow the clear
determination of a country's
national interests. If those interests are
assumed to
include the ability to project power everywhere and all the
time, then indeed the threat is also unlimited and permanent.
* * *
Copyright 2001,
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