Way back when we were 18 years old that seemed a very long time, but at our current age it seems just a blink of the eye since Islamist terrorists toppled the World Trade Center and crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. Enough time has passed, however, to change everything.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks America had a rare moment of national unity, unseen since the similarly deadly Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and there was bipartisan support for President George W. Bush waging war against the Taliban government of Afghanistan that had hosted the training camps of the Al-Qaeda terror gang responsible for the atrocity. When Bush later sought to wage war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi dictatorship it was more controversial, but two subsequent Democratic presidential nominees voted to authorize the use of military force, and there was a strong consensus that America had to take the fight to Islamist terrorism.
Public opinion started to shift when both wars proved harder than expected, and without any spectacular attacks on the west the threat of Islamist terrorism seemed to wane over time, and the Democrats were the first to abandon the cause. By 2011 President Barack Obama, who had won the Democratic nomination over former Sen. Hillary Clinton in large part because of her vote for the Iraq War, announced a complete withdrawal of American forces from the country, although he reluctantly remained in Afghanistan. By 2016 the Republicans nominated a candidate who claimed to have been opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning, and echoed the radical left’s false claim that Bush had lied to the country into the conflict, and the consensus of opinion had clearly turned against taking the fight to Islamist terrorism. President Donald Trump has “tweeted” a confession that he even invited the Taliban leadership to Camp David just before the anniversary of the terror attacks they had sponsored, and although the war against radical Islamist terror continues for now it is no longer anyone’s campaign issue.
Our opinion is quite clearly in the minority, but we hate to see America backing off. The war in Afghanistan has been going for nearly 18 years, making it by far America’s longest war, and despite Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq we still have troops there fighting the Islamist State terror gang and the rest of the chaos that predictably resulted, and there is no complete victory in sight, so we can well-understand the war weariness. There haven’t been any “9/11” sized terrorist attacks for so long that many 18-year-olds figure it’s like Fort Sumter or Pearl Harbor or another of those boring chapters in the history books, and there are plenty of problems here at home, so we can’t hardly blame the country for its complacent non-interventionism.
Even so, we think it shortsighted. The long, long wars in the Middle East over the past 18 years have resulted in the deaths of 7,000 or so military personnel, and a similar number of American contractors, and we don’t want to diminish any of these deaths, but by the ruthless mathematics of war that’s just a couple of bad afternoons at Antietam or on Normandy beach, on a monthly basis more people are killed by nut cases with AR-15s at a Wax-Mart or music festival, and it’s a fatality rate that would have convinced previous generations that God had blessed their fight. By now both parties figure that the Islamist terrorism threat is a mere nuisance, as it hasn’t pulled off anything on a 9/11 scale for eighteen years, but both fail to honor those 7,000 or so fallen heroes for making that possible.
America’s Korean War was considered a stalemate, and its Vietnam War an ignominious loss, but despite the horrific fatalities both can now be see as lost battles in a broader Cold War that America and the West won by demonstrating resolve. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars are also seen at last, at least for now, but in the long run history might well note that Islamist radicalism did not prevail in its jihad against the resolve of the infidels.
We’ll not be so absurd as to propose a complete ban on any Muslims entering the country, as Trump once did, but there is a small but troublesome part of the Islamic world intent on making war against us, and for the foreseeable future we figure we’ll have to be at war against them. At least Trump didn’t go ahead and surrender to the radical Islamists from the Taliban he had invited to Camp David on the 18th anniversary of their terror attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., but he did fire the national security advisor who had advised against it, and he seems eager to end the centuries old war between radical Islam and the West on any terms that will get him reelected next year.
None of those damned Democrats running for president seem any more willing to continue the painful prosecution of a war that the radical Islamists declared against us, but we expect they’ll be as constrained by reality expert opinion as Trump has been and Obama and Bush were. America and what’s left of its diplomatic and military alliances are far stronger than their radical Islamist enemies, but our adversaries won’t soon stop blowing things up and killing innocents in their quixotic war for global domination, and we might yet get used to it. On the 18th anniversary of the deadliest attacked ever launched against American soil, though, we’ll hope that both parties will remember why we fight.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 