“I want to say one thing: This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty or the powerful, it is not aimed at presidents or prime ministers, it was aimed at ordinary working-class Londoners. That isn’t an ideology, it isn’t even a perverted faith, it’s mass murder.”
– London Mayor Ken Livingstone
Last week, James Lileks writes in the Screedblog:
I can imagine in late 2001 asking a question of myself in 2005:
What’s the main story? The smallpox quarantine? Fallout from the Iranian – Israeli exchange contaminating Indian crops? A series of bombings in heartland malls?
“Well, no – the big story today has to do with soldiers mishandling terrorists’ holy texts at a detention center.”
Mishandling? How? Like, you mean, they opened it up without first checking to see if it was ticking, and it blew up –
“No, they handled it in a way that disrespected it. Infidels are supposed to use gloves.”
Oh. So we lost, then.
And by the way, has it not occurred to anyone that during the years since 9/11 there has not been a single terrorist attack on the United States? Do you think they simply stopped trying? Or have we been winning a secret war of information in dark rooms in Langley, Virginia? How many failed attempts have there been to kill you and your family in the past four years? Two? Twenty? One Hundred?
and more….
As you sit here reading this, there are men and women working around the clock using information obtained – not just without torture, but humanely – to keep us safe at night. They do this without any recognition or fanfare. But there are no less than ten televised award shows each year honoring those who do the best job at playing make-believe, and more often than not, the heroes they pretend to be are the soldiers and intelligence agents and policemen they so spectacularly spit upon the second the camera stops rolling.
We worship the wrong people.
Indeed, we do. Indeed, we do.
Sanctuary Part I over at Eject, Eject, Eject….
After about six months of thought, this morning Bill Whittle posts the latest of his monster philosophy essays: Sanctuary
What’s worse than crawling under your beloved house and seeing the foundations rotten with decades of termite damage?
NOT crawling under your beloved house and seeing the foundations rotten with decades of termite damage.
I’ve been away for a while, doing a little thinking. Usually, my thoughts for these past few years have started at home and then taken me to Iraq, and the war. Lately, though, I have been thinking about Iraq, and my thoughts turn more and more to home.
I started thinking along these lines six months ago, after a young Marine shot and killed a wounded Iraqi in a mosque in Fallujah
The ideas behind this little adventure we are about to embark upon have changed enormously since then. I have, quite frankly, been at a loss to know how to put so many wide-ranging snapshots together into this montage, this image, this idea of Sanctuary that I think holds the key to many of the problems we face today.
Stay with me — our fist stop is not our destination, but it is a necessary one. So let me first take you on that original journey, and show you how events in Iraq can show us how to fight and win a much wider and deeper conflict, right here at home.
I’ve not read it yet – and don’t have time this morning. But based on Bill’s past track record, I’ll be glued to the screen tonight devouring his latest.
Visited Ground Zero this week and then trekked over to the NYPD Museum and Battery Park. Some shots:
As usual, Victor Davis Hanson speaks the truth:
America should not gratuitously welcome such dislike; but we should not apologize for it either. Sometimes the caliber of a nation is found not in why it is liked, but rather in why it is not. By January 1, 1941, I suppose a majority on the planet — the Soviet Union, all of Eastern Europe, France, Italy, Spain, and even many elsewhere in occupied Europe, most of Latin America, Japan and its Asian empire, the entire Arab world, many in India — would have professed a marked preference for Hitler’s Germany over Churchill’s England.
Think about it. When Europe orders all American troops out; when Japan claims our textbooks whitewash the Japanese forced internment or Hiroshima; when China cites unfair trade with the United States; when South Korea says get the hell off our DMZ; when India complains that we are dumping outsourced jobs on them; when Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians refuse cash aid; when Canada complains that we are not carrying our weight in collective North American defense; when the United Nations moves to Damascus; when the Arab Street seethes that we are pushing theocrats and autocrats down its throat; when Mexico builds a fence to keep us out; when Latin America proclaims a boycott of the culturally imperialistic Major Leagues; and when the world ignores American books, films, and popular culture, then perhaps we should be worried. But something tells me none of that is going to happen in this lifetime.
At dinner last night, the sidekick and I were discussing a discussion about gun control over at another blog where we had both commented. After awhile, some Europeans came over and started commenting about America’s fascination with guns and how unsafe our country was, and so on, and so forth.
While I have nothing against Europe as a whole, it’s this holier-than-thou enlightened attitude that some Europeans have that frustrates me. In alot of ways, I’ve lost my desire to debate some of those topics.
The UN? Corrupt, but salvageable.
Iraq, we did the right thing.
Afghanistan, we did the right thing.
Re-electing George W. Bush, we did the right thing.
Gun Control? A firm grip, no more.
Our taxes? Too high.
As our esteemed Secretary of State said recently while in France:
“There cannot be an absence of moral content in American foreign policy. Europeans giggle at this, but we are not European, we are American, and we have different principles.”
I’m quite happy being an American, thanks.
Over at Neptunus Lex, Lex’s latest takes a shot across the bow that those that can’t seem to get past the last election:
Nothing do I see that clarifies for me any more than all of that which has gone before, the necessity of the fight, or how long it might last. How many more must die, or be maimed, before we come to the clearing at the end of the path. Everything points on to a grim slog, a painful task that needs being done. And this is only one theater, in a much larger, potentially generational struggle between the forces of modernity and those of reaction. And make no mistake – even as events in Lebanon, Syria, Israel/Palestine, Baghdad and even Saudi unfold in a direction which could scarcely have been imagined a few short years ago, the forces of reaction are not about to strike the tent and fade into the background. Their death struggles will be titanic, because for them, like for us, there is no turning back, no possibility of surrender.
But I am persuaded, and have been for a long time, of the necessity of taking the fight to the Salafist heartland. Of winning it there, by supplanting tyranny with hope.
[..]
But there are some out there that just can’t get over it, any of it. They can’t get the politics out of their head, even while brave soldiers engage in incredibleacts of heroism, and some of them make ultimate sacrifices. They can’t get over the fact that the last national election was nothing if not a judgment on all that went before, and a mandate on how to finish – even if it wasn’t a whole-hearted endorsement of the process. These folks are justso damned certain that the war’s Original Sin blots out any chance to salvage a righteous outcome. For these folks it’s all a part of some right wing plot to… do what? Ruin the country, I gather. Quite how, I’m never sure. Many of them evidently keep their fingers crossed hoping for bad news (payable in Iraqi and American lives) while stuffing their fingers in their ears whenever good news comes out. For these folks, and their despicable certainty, I have nothing but genial contempt – and much less patience than Smash.
I’m an impatient irritable bastard usually, so I’ll be even more impatient. I can’t even discuss the war anymore with the folks that Lex describes in his last paragraph – it’s not worth my time.