Nine years have passed, and the drift back to September 10th has become, among the progressive intelligentsia, a flood tide. Ted Koppel, that calm voice of leftish conventional wisdom, marks 9/11 with a Washington Post column summing up the progressive narrative: The attacks were the work of an isolated gang, reflective of no broader tendency in the Islamic world. Our initial response – overthrowing Taliban rule in Afghanistan – was measured and appropriate. (Leftists have forgotten how harshly they derided it at the time, e. g., Senator Biden’s castigation of “high-tech bullies”.) We should have stopped there:
This is the point at which President George W. Bush should have declared “mission accomplished,” with the caveat that unspecified U.S. agencies and branches of the military would continue the hunt for al-Qaeda’s leader.
Instead of stopping, we proceeded to oust Saddam Hussein, an innocent bystander who fell victim to our “unsubstantiated assumptions” that he “had developed weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons; that there was a connection between the Iraqi leader and al-Qaeda”. From that “overreaction”, combined with “Abu Ghraib, ‘black sites,’ extraordinary rendition and . . . the prison at Guantanamo Bay”, Islamofascism was spawned.
Had we only remained calm, Mr. Koppel implies, we would today have no need for “a swollen national security apparatus”, nor would we have to worry about what happens in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia or Yemen. He does seem to recognize that history can’t be undone and that we can’t unilaterally end the war between Islamofascism and the West. (No doubt the clarion call for retreat will be postponed until Barack Obama leaves office. Watch the WaPo op-ed page on September 11, 2013.) The point of his exercise is to squeeze history into a progressive strait jacket and make future generations understand that the cause of the present distress is the arrogance and pretension of an America that has not yet atoned for its illiberal past.
The key premise of this progressive interpretation is that, before 9/11, there was no mass of extremism among Moslems of which Osama bin-Laden and al-Qa’eda were merely a part. The 9/11 match was, on this view, thrown onto the concrete floor of an empty room and became a conflagration only because the fire department doused it with kerosene.
That is a comforting picture, for it suggests that Islamic radicalism is a transitory phenomenon, one that we can mitigate with soothing gestures. What renders it implausible is that the effect is so disproportionate to the alleged cause. If America overreacted to 9/11, what is the term for the widespread Moslem reaction to our invasion of an overtly hostile country ruled by a despot with a long record of killing and oppressing Moslems? (Saddam’s regime was militantly secular through most of its reign, grabbing the Islamic banner only after the debacle of the First Gulf War.) If, as Mr. Koppel asserts, “America’s war on terrorism is widely perceived throughout Pakistan [and presumably elsewhere] as a war on Islam”, doesn’t so baseless a “perception” suggest something severely wrong with the eyes of the beholders?
America has gone to extraordinary lengths to demonstrate “respect” for Islam. Our historical record is far from hostile: We supported Moslems against communists in Afghanistan, Moslems against Christians in Kosovo, Moslems against Arab socialists in Kuwait. Our leaders have consistently avoided assigning any blame for terrorism to the teachings of Mohammed. Just in the past week, they reacted with indignation to a minor league agitator’s threat to burn Korans, as if enforcing Moslem anti-blasphemy laws were a legitimate concern of the government.
To characterize American actions as “anti-Islamic” is literally (by which I don’t mean figuratively) insane. Why that insanity has seized so many Moslems, and why those who aren’t insane appear to be by and large afraid to speak out in contradiction, is a topic for separate discussion and debate. What isn’t debatable is that nothing America could have done or omitted to do would have prevented this ongoing war, because a large proportion of the dar al-Islam was eager and willing to assault the West, needing only a dramatic gesture to set it in motion. If we don’t understand that, and let our misunderstanding inform our actions, we are highly unlikely to be satisfied with the future course of events.