They can talk for hours about how wrong it was to kill babies, busboys, businessmen, receptionists, janitors, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers – and then they lean towards you, eyes wide, and they say the fatal word:
But.
And then you realize that the eulogy is just a preface. All that concern for the dead is nothing more than the knuckle-cracking of an organist who’s going to play an E minor chord until we all agree we had it coming.
I’ve no doubt that if Seattle or Boston or Manhattan goes up in a bright white flash there will be those who blame it all on Bush. We squandered the world’s good will. We threw away the opportunity to atone, and lashed out.
Really? You want to see lashing out? Imagine Kabul and Mecca and Baghdad and Tehran on 9/14 crowned with mushroom clouds: that’s lashing out. Imagine the President in the National Cathedral castigating Islam instead of sitting next to an Imam who’s giving a homily.
Mosques burned, oil fields occupied, smart bombs slamming into Syrian palaces. We could have gone full Roman on anyone we wanted, but we didn’t. And we won’t.
Which is why this war will be long.
As I sat in the Embassy in Belgrade and watched the startling, horrible TV coverage from New York, I said to others there that the people who did this could be suppressed only by Islamic moderates round the world rising up and taking them out.
What if Islamic moderates are unable or unwilling to take on this job?
What if they just aren’t brave enough?
What if they secretly – or not so secretly – feel that even though they despise Islamic terrorists, they hate the West more?
What if Islamist fanatics are sneakily egged on by the Russians and Chinese and others, who loath Islam but are happy to see Western democracies bogged down battling Islamic extremism?
What if pathological inferiority complexes after accumulated centuries of cultural failure get attached to Really Big Oil from the Middle East, and lash out at supposed Western enemies?
Yes. Plenty of reasons why this war will be long.
Share this page:
