from Victor Davis Hanson in
The National Review

The Other 9/11 Story
What has and hasn’t happened in the seven years since September 11, 2001.

excerpts:

It would be cruel to relate by name all those prominent Americans — including politicians, think-tankers, pundits, and military analysts — who felt once, and vehemently so, that the rogue and genocidal regime of Saddam Hussein — in violation of UN accords and 1991 armistice agreements, and the object of 12 years of no-fly zones — was an impediment to the need to change the conditions that had fostered 9/11. Yet suffice it to say that, when Iraq went from a brilliant three-week victory to someone else’s flawed and bloody five-year occupation, almost no prior supporter of the need to remove Saddam could be found. It was not just that most changed their minds as the pulse of the battlefield changed; but rather that many prior supporters insidiously convinced themselves that in the now distant past they had never advocated such a supposedly preposterous war in the first place.

Seven years later, hundreds of billions of dollars have been expended; over 4,000 Americans have been lost in Iraq and Afghanistan; and America’s preexisting cultural wounds have had their thin scabs torn off by acrimony over warring abroad and security at home. And yet herein lies the greatest paradox of all that followed from September 11. If no one on September 12, 2001 thought it possible that the United States would not be hit again by a terrorist attack of similar magnitude, here we are still free from a major terrorist assault over 2,500 days later.

Bin Laden and Dr. Zawahiri are still hiding out in the caves of tribal Pakistan, in fear of daylight sorties by deadly American drones, but counting on safety from coalition ground attack through the auspices of their wink-and-nod — and nuclear — Islamic Pakistani hosts. The top cadres of al-Qaeda, nonetheless, are now either mostly dead, captured, or in hiding. When al-Qaeda now whines in its infomercials, the complaint is about Shiite Iran who supposedly helped the infidel Americans, not the Americans themselves who alone sent them to the caves of Pakistan and defeated them in, and routed them from, Iraq.

In response, polls reveal that Middle Eastern support for bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the tactic of suicide bombing are at an all-time low. Constitutional governments remain in power in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Al-Qaeda has suffered a terrible material and public-relations defeat in the heart of the ancient caliphate.

The truth is, we chased al-Qaeda from Iraq and Afghanistan and it is now in lunatic fashion chasing Danish cartoonists, European novelists, and opera producers as it cuts the fingers off smokers, tries to cover up the genitalia of animals, and looks for the mentally ill to strap on suicide belts.

But in years to come it may well be said that the president kept us safe for years when none thought he could, and removed the two most odious regimes in the Middle East and replaced them with the two best — and confronted a confident and ascendant radical Islam and left it demoralized and discredited among its own host Arab and Muslim constituents.

In the present toxic environment, all of that is not to be spoken — but all that has nevertheless happened since September 11.


print