Walter Russell Mead: 9/11, Islam and War
[Walter Russell Mead is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He blogs at The-American-Interest.com.]
Nine years ago this morning I came up from the subway stop at 68th Street and Lexington Avenue to hear from the breakfast cart vendor that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in lower Manhattan. It didn’t seem that important; I pictured a small two seater private plane crashing into a large building and hoped that no one had been killed. Once I got to my office, it became clear that something bigger had happened. Then came a groan from a group of people watching television a few doors down the hall; I rushed in to see the second plane hitting the second tower.
In the hours that followed, life in New York gradually fell apart. Great clouds of ash and smoke rose up from the fires; the transport system crashed. When the buildings collapsed, telephone service went down across the city. With the news of the attack on the Pentagon I went out to withdraw cash from my bank in fear that electric power also would fail. Traffic came to a halt; by early afternoon there were tens of thousands of grimy, dirty people trudging up the avenues of the city, walking home from lower Manhattan. The BBC asked me to come down to their studios near Times Square for an interview; it was almost impossible to get there — even more difficult to get back. I spent the night with friends; the subway system that had brought me into Manhattan could not get me home.
Nine years later, we are still living in the world that introduced itself on that grim and unforgettable day. Shadowy organizations of hate-crazed fanatics seek to destroy the foundations of civilized life. Satan, we are told, can appear as an Angel of Light; these grandiose, delusional fools have mistaken the King of Death for the Maker of the Universe. “Evil be thou my good,” is what Satan said as he contemplated the ruins of his hopes in Paradise Lost; this is what the Osama bin Ladens of the world have come to. When a bomb goes off in a mosque, they rejoice that God’s will is done. When schoolchildren die horribly in the ruins of a burning bus, they give thanks and praise to God. They pine for greater destruction, greater havoc, for mass deaths of millions; the blood of the innocent has become a drug they cannot live without.
The question of how to deal with these fanatical death-eaters has convulsed world and American politics ever since. It is fatal to ignore them, fatal also to react to their attacks in ways that inflate rather than diminish their support. The free peoples of the world ultimately learned to fight communism though not without many costly blunders and mistakes. We can and will defeat this new scourge, born like Nazism and communism of the hatreds and failures of the world. We will learn, we will grow, we will act and we will by God’s grace and God’s help win.
In some ways we are winning already...
Read entire article at American Interest (blog)
Nine years ago this morning I came up from the subway stop at 68th Street and Lexington Avenue to hear from the breakfast cart vendor that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in lower Manhattan. It didn’t seem that important; I pictured a small two seater private plane crashing into a large building and hoped that no one had been killed. Once I got to my office, it became clear that something bigger had happened. Then came a groan from a group of people watching television a few doors down the hall; I rushed in to see the second plane hitting the second tower.
In the hours that followed, life in New York gradually fell apart. Great clouds of ash and smoke rose up from the fires; the transport system crashed. When the buildings collapsed, telephone service went down across the city. With the news of the attack on the Pentagon I went out to withdraw cash from my bank in fear that electric power also would fail. Traffic came to a halt; by early afternoon there were tens of thousands of grimy, dirty people trudging up the avenues of the city, walking home from lower Manhattan. The BBC asked me to come down to their studios near Times Square for an interview; it was almost impossible to get there — even more difficult to get back. I spent the night with friends; the subway system that had brought me into Manhattan could not get me home.
Nine years later, we are still living in the world that introduced itself on that grim and unforgettable day. Shadowy organizations of hate-crazed fanatics seek to destroy the foundations of civilized life. Satan, we are told, can appear as an Angel of Light; these grandiose, delusional fools have mistaken the King of Death for the Maker of the Universe. “Evil be thou my good,” is what Satan said as he contemplated the ruins of his hopes in Paradise Lost; this is what the Osama bin Ladens of the world have come to. When a bomb goes off in a mosque, they rejoice that God’s will is done. When schoolchildren die horribly in the ruins of a burning bus, they give thanks and praise to God. They pine for greater destruction, greater havoc, for mass deaths of millions; the blood of the innocent has become a drug they cannot live without.
The question of how to deal with these fanatical death-eaters has convulsed world and American politics ever since. It is fatal to ignore them, fatal also to react to their attacks in ways that inflate rather than diminish their support. The free peoples of the world ultimately learned to fight communism though not without many costly blunders and mistakes. We can and will defeat this new scourge, born like Nazism and communism of the hatreds and failures of the world. We will learn, we will grow, we will act and we will by God’s grace and God’s help win.
In some ways we are winning already...