Wall St Journal editorial

dwarven1

Lonely Mountain Arms
Joined
Mar 13, 2005
Messages
27,861
Likes
2,415
Location
Starksboro, VT
Feedback: 33 / 0 / 0
WONDER LAND

Reality Happens
London's bombs go off inside America's head.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, August 5, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

On September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and one into rural Pennsylvania. In just over an hour, they killed nearly 3,000 Americans. Not more than a year later, nothing was more important in the lives of many Americans than that they extinguish the Patriot Act and drive George Bush and every remnant of his presidency from office, including the "unconstitutional" war on terror.

March 11, 2004, terrorists cut from the same Islamic cloth as September 11 blew up four Spanish commuter trains, covering Madrid's main station with parts of 191 dead people and 1,460 others, often horribly wounded. But the needle hardly moved in the politics of "George Bush's war on terror." In the U.S., nothing was more important than "closing" a holding pen for Islamic terrorists in Cuba.

July 7, 2005: the London bombings. In the four weeks since this happened, I have talked about it, on the West Coast and East Coast, with people one could describe as "non-Bush voters." To a man and woman, they say in so many words that the time has come to "get tough on the terrorists." One event, London, appears to have caused an internal reassessment among some Americans formerly ambivalent about the war on terror.

Profiling, a forbidden thought in some political quarters since hyper-thyroidic New Jersey state cops were rousting black people on the turnpike, is a subject for polite company. After years of reading how our "policies" were creating Islamic recruits to jihad, the London bombing has created recruits for the war on terror.

What happened?

Reality happened. September 11 was, in a sense, unreal. T.S. Eliot reflected in 1922 on "unreal" postwar London:

I had not thought death had undone so many
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet

I think for some, what happened that day--passenger planes flown into buildings, the slow death of the towers--was just too much, off the charts, a trauma and a personal concussion. Something like that. July 7 London was more comprehensible. Americans were able to absorb London more clinically, observers from afar. London also happened to an English-speaking people, so every televised comment back to the U.S., from the first witnesses to the police reports of apprehended and named terrorists, was understood and internalized. Then the British media, God bless them, reduced the madness to one, right cliché: The bombers are our neighbors. Three years in, the battle lines finally come clear.

The American psyche, or some part of it, has seemed disinclined to believe terrorists could be anything other than invaders from another planet. Seasonal, like the hurricanes. No matter that the Lackawanna Six, who pleaded guilty to terrorism charges, were as much "the neighbors" in upstate New York as the bombers from London's suburbs. No matter that the trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers revealed they too were "the neighbors" or, worse, a fifth column. No matter. Within a year of September 11, one of the most controversial, bitterly contested parts of the Patriot Act was the provision on surveillance of books checked out at the library.

We had become captive to the wrong media cliché. Saying 9/11 "changed everything" meant nothing. That allowed another cliché to take hold and define the policy debate after 9/11: Whatever else, we can't "sacrifice our fundamental values." (I think much of this had to do with the fact that the opposition personally didn't like the Patriot Act's designated evangelist, John Ashcroft, especially after hearing he held Bible readings at work.)

The London bombings imprinted on hardwired political minds the crude fact that Islamic terrorists have reduced the taking of lives they don't like to a banality. They play cricket or go rafting, and then they blow up the neighbors. It was easier than ever to connect the dots of the July 7 narrative: The London "neighbors" look like they're out to get us.

No, we are not going to flush John Locke and Thomas Jefferson down the toilet. "Speech," no matter how stupid, will remain free and protected; vocalized incitement to violence against the neighbors won't. Some of the Patriot Act's most aggressive measures, such as searches of personal and business records, almost surely will be sunsetted in the final bill. Courts will preclear and review some investigations. The FBI director himself must press his seal to library and bookstore searches.

Tony Blair said last week that after September 11 much of the world "turned over and went back to sleep again." So why won't Ambien and Valium induce again the sleep of fatal innocence? The sleeper cells, if they're sharp, will play cricket and pump gas for two years while the West's politicians and editorialists convince the new antiterror recruits that the war's tactics are still worse than the threat.

I think the burden for preventing that, for consolidating the new center-left recruits, lies with President Bush. The post-9/11 slumber was both psychological and political. It became a partisan mindset. London was electroshock therapy. Mr. Bush needs to speak to his public opposition, suggest some understanding of their former discomfort and restate the stakes. Why? Because the widest and deepest possible popular opposition to Islam's homicidal strain is crucial to ending it. Their primary target is the public will. They need to see, not now but two years from now, amid a presidential election, that on July 7, they blew it.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
 
Good Old WSJ. Definitely not a Liberal Rag, but very objective, and usually moderate (not Conservative), since they tend to "tell it like it is".

One thing you CAN count on is the Liberals in the US getting very little support from the Liberals in the UK (except for the very far left minority).
 
When we served with the british Army and Air Force, their out look on things is way different than ours. They were really into the occupying role in Berlin,and were not going to let the Krauts forget it. They were a trip.
 
I did 2 weeks working directly with Canadians in 1986 (in the winter). We had a blast.

Great folks to work with, and they let their NCOs run things. I was an E-7 then, the guy with me an E-6. We got caught pulling a shift of guard duty (roving) one afternoon, we were just giving the troops a couple of hours break. We couldn't pull radio watch, since neither of us spoke good enough French. Well, their Motor Sgt (equiv to an E-6) caught us, and grabbed the Sgt of the Guard, who didn't know what rank we were. He was some embarrased about letting us pull a shift, but we didn't care. 2:00 in the afternoon, sunshine, 20 MPH breeze, and -40 F (not wind chill, either). I thought it was funny, myself.
 
I haven't taught basic pistol in a while -- been too busy with work and life. But back when I was teaching...

At the beginning of my class, I'd have each student introduce themselves and have them say why they were taking the class. Before 9/11, no student -- not a single one over the course of 5 years -- said they were taking the class because they wanted to get a gun for personal security. I suspected that many were taking it precisely for that reason, but that they felt they could not say that.

For about a year after 9/11, demand for courses increased dramatically. I distinctly remember my first class after 9/11 where every single student said they were taking a course so that they could get a gun for personal security.

I believe that 9/11 was a life-changing event for many people.
 
M1911 said:
I believe that 9/11 was a life-changing event for many people.

We found the same thing as well, M. Although a few students (not many) pre-9/11 would say it was for personal protection. After 9/11, the phone didn't stop ringing for nearly two months. We were doing 2 classes a week with 6 in each class and we did those classes for a good month before we cut it down to one course a week with several booked out in advance. We could easily have done more, but we had space constraints and we were getting tired. I've also noticed that after every terrorist attack we get more calls - even tho the attacks aren't in the US.
 
Ditto. Every class we do, we start by asking people to introduce themselves, tell us about their shooting experience (if any) and why they're here. Starting in '99 we had a big number of people with a lot of experience who previously had only held FID's upgrading to LTC's since the cost and the BS involved were essentially the same. Starting about 6 months after 9/11 we started getting a noticeable number of people giving personal/family protection as a reason.

Ken
 
I had my real fun a few days later. We captured an Opposing Force OP (also Canadian). Must've been real embarrasing for them to be caught by a bunch of Support Troops, led by an American NCO, even if we were from a Recon unit (the Candians).
 
Too funny. Glenn loved it at Devens when he was teaching,and got to ambush the students. We didn't get to play Army in Berlin at all. NEVER saw the field. Then again sometimes didn't see the light of day either.
 
Don't tell me the sun didn't shine in Berlin. It sure did in Frankfurt (1st tour) and Scweinfurt (2nd tour). At least once every 30 days or so, not much more than that, I swear.
 
No, I worked in a place that had no windows except for the mess hall and where our Mud Puppies where checking badges and bags. I worked alot of double shifts,so depending on when I went in and left as to whether I saw daylight. Here's a link it has pictures,but the Krauts trying to figure out what all of it is don't have it all right. Glenn and I got a good laugh at some of their guesses though. www.ccc.de/teufelsberg/index.html
 
It's why we had an open checkbook, and could order anything we wanted as long as we didn't order another field station,which one of our mechs tried doing but with a golf course. [lol]
 
Open Checkbook? Damn, I wish I had that luxury on my last tour. I was Motor Sergeant for an Air Defense Battery, just a very few miles from the border, and we were some tight for money sometimes.
 
We wore the Army uniform but that is who we worked for. Also why everyone had to have the clearances we had to be able to work there.Cooks included. Why we also had our own Mud Puppies.We'd have parts deadlined,but we'd have their replacements next shipment. Took longer to send parts back than it was to get them.
 
Yup, several units I've been in, everyone had to have a clearance. When I got my clearance originally, the only person that didn't have a Secret or higher was the unit clerk, and she was a British citizen, in the US Army, so, no clearance for her.
 
When I was getting my clearance,because my mother wasn't a US Citizen at the time,she's from Holland. They gave me alot of grief over it and because I had relatives there.
 
Back
Top Bottom