Friday, March 29, AD 2024 8:35am

Twenty Years Since 9-11

Hard to believe it has been two decades, or will be in three days.  My sons were just going on ten and my daughter was six.  My surviving son celebrated his thirtieth birthday this week and my formerly baby girl is now twenty-six and a librarian.

Distance helps in understanding a large historical event.  Two decades is a lot in the span of a human life time, but it isn’t much in the span of history.  When we were observing the hundredth anniversary of World War I, I thought we were still too close to that event to make sense of it.  9-11 is not in the league of World War I as to huge historical events, but twenty years is a much shorter period than a century.

Having said that I think we can draw some conclusions now:

  1. Unity-the unity we saw after 9-11 was fleeting indeed and the process of fragmentation of the American people, an ongoing process since the sixties of the last century, soon got underway again.  It still is a memory I cherish, especially the cars of ordinary people flying American flags.
  2. Terrorism in the US-Nothing on the scale of 9-11 has happened since 9-11.  I think the credit for this owes more to the difficulty of terrorists carrying off such an event, rather than the often absurd precautions we have taken, although the willingness of passengers on air liners to act swiftly against other passengers posing a threat has been helpful on occasion.
  3. War on Terror-This slogan of the Bush administration, and eagerly trumpeted by the media, was unfortunate.  Terrorism is as old as civilization and comes in endless varieties.  The American people were not interested in fighting terrorism in general, but rather the specific terrorists and supporting groups who had carried out 9-11.  The slogan was a distraction from the main task at hand.
  4. Afghan War-In toppling the Taliban government which had supported and sheltered Al Qaeda, the Afghan incursion in 2001-2002 was a brilliant military success;  as a nation building project from 2002-2021 it was a colossal, and utterly foreseeable, failure.  This will have ramifications echoing down the next two decades.
  5. Iraq War-Afghanistan was the good war and the Iraq War was the bad war in the eyes of critics of the Bush administration.  Ironically the Iraq War was the success.  Saddam Hussein is pushing up weeds, we devastated the terrorist networks that came to fight against us in Iraq, and the Iraqi government appears stable.  Mission accomplished, at least as much as a mission can be accomplished in the Middle East.
  6. Al Qaeda War-Bin Laden has long since become fish chow.  We decimated his organization.  It still exists but is a shadow of its former self.
  7. American troops-Superb overall, as they have always been throughout our often stormy history.  Their top leadership, largely thanks to the malign influence of the Obama administration, saw warriors replaced by political time servers.  The military has always had some politicians in uniform at the top, but the ceaseless drive of Obama to neuter our Generals and Admirals as a source of potential opposition to him has born ill fruit.  America’s finest deserves better.
  8. Counter-insurgency-Became all the rage as we fought our wars in the sandbox.  China, the coming threat, will require a doctrinal pivot, and I see little proof that our military leadership has even begun to think of the next war.
  9. Our 9-11 Dead-We need to continue to pray for them, to remember them and to strive to make our nation and the world better.  They were the first casualties in a war that reminded the idiots among us that history did not end with the cold war.
  10. Me-I am still consumed with the rage I felt 20 years ago.  Attempting to treat 9-11 as a historical event and to analyze it dispassionately remains difficult for me.  Maybe that is as it should be.  People who experience history perhaps are not meant to engage in the type of study future historians will give to the event.  One reason why History is always  a discipline with limitations.  I always recall the saying, “You really had to be there.” when trying to understand any historical event.  That is certainly case for that day of death for 3000 of our murdered fellow Americans.

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T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Wednesday, September 8, AD 2021 5:28am

Exactly like on 10 Sep 2001, they act as if there is peace. The tangos are at war.

My youngest son’s Little League coach was a FDNY Lt. They couldn’t find his body, so they celebrated a funeral [there were hundreds of them] without. Later, they found his remains. And, his widow and children went through a second funeral.

You would be banned on Facebook and Instagram for posting those seditious pictures.

The hajjis won November 2020 when the Chinese-controlled cabal stole the elections.

The main threat to our way of life isn’t those childish savages – it’s the Left and the corrupt, China-controlled regime.

Stolen elections have consequences.

Foxfier
Admin
Wednesday, September 8, AD 2021 10:04am

1)
I don’t think it accelerated; I think that seeing their beliefs shattered broke something in an already stressed group– the folks like the high school teacher who’d grown up “knowing” the Rosenbergs were absolutely innocent martyrs of the disordered witch-hunts against The Reds, who could not cope with a 15 year old girl bringing in the declassified documents that showed she’d been systematically lied to by the very group she’d been told didn’t exist, were under major stress.
The availability of information made it HARDER for the Dan Rather style liars to do their nonsense, as was demonstrated not long after by Dan Rather himself. The “most trusted man in America” was unworthy of that trust.

The same people who were flying test-balloons of “we deserved it” while the towers were still smoking could choose to reform, or they could double-down.
They doubled-down.
A horrifying number of folks went along with them– I’ve got theories, which can be boiled down to “sin makes you stupid” and observing the cult-grooming/sexual abuser behavior of a lot of the KNOWN Soviet influenced groups, but that’s not super helpful for countering it.
Emphasizing that you can say you were wrong and NOT be cast out, that there IS forgiveness, will work.
That’s why folks like Milo drive them so utterly, insanely and completely bonkers. We’re supposed to hate him forever, not go “I disagree with this or that, but on this third thing he’s quite correct.”

10)
I keep seeing the guy in my boot camp graduation group– was actually in the room across the hall from ours. We were, as I’ve mentioned, in the middle of Navy boot camp on 9/11.
His mom’s family had some kind of an eatery in one of the towers. EVERYONE in her family worked there. His mom had been sent out to go get some stupid thing that was supposed to have been ordered but hadn’t shown up, so she lived…
The offered him an instant out of the Navy, no harm no foul; he said no. They offered him a break from boot camp, until he mentally recovered. He said no. They asked what they could possibly do because half of his entire family was wiped out and that is a really big f’ing deal.
He asked if he could stay with his team and graduate on time, because stopping the people who killed his family was more important than going to their funerals.
….they got him to the funeral anyways, and he graduated with us; this was the Sunday graduation sermon before we went on our first liberty since the world changed.
I still can’t believe A GUY WHO FOUGHT MONDAY FRIDAY NAZIS walked up and thanked me for my service, much less the WAVE and the WWII-Korea (I think) nurse that were with him. I think I stammered out something about how all I’d done was sign up and not flunk boot camp.

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