Take back the plane (three political lessons)

The Ottawa Citizen ^ | Saturday, April 29, 2006 | Leonard Stern

[fanfan]

United 93, the just-released movie about the passengers who fought back against their hijackers on 9/11, is being recognized as one of the most terrifying films to come out of Hollywood in recent years.

My colleague Peter Simpson, the Citizen's arts and entertainment editor, was so affected after Monday's advance screening that he wrote a front-page assessment for the next-day's paper. The horror, he correctly noted, stems from the astonishing realism and the awful sense of inevitability: The audience knows how the story ends. My other colleague Jay Stone gave United 93 five stars in his review yesterday.

I too attended the advance screening, not as an arts critic but as a student of terrorism and militant Islam. Jay and Peter are right that the movie is effective as a piece of drama, but I took away three political lessons.

1) Soldiers, not lunatics: 9/11 was so sensational in conception and execution, so wholly out-of-the box, that many people assumed it was the product of disordered minds. What kind of madmen fly aircraft into buildings?

United 93 makes clear that the hijackers, though on a suicide mission, were not madmen. They were disciplined, well-trained and committed, in other words, soldiers. True, they believed their cause was worth dying for, but other soldiers on other battlefields in history have approached their missions that way.

There are strategic implications. If we characterize jihadists as crazed sociopaths, we risk dismissing them as aberrations or freaks and minimizing the threat they represent. We risk making 9/11 into a unique criminal event, like a random school shooting or the Paul Bernardo murders.

Sociopathic criminals like Paul Bernardo are interested in self-gratification and pose a danger mainly to individuals who come into their personal orbit. But the 9/11 hijackers had broader ambitions: They belonged to a political movement larger than themselves. Criminal acts are different from acts of war, and we need to understand the difference if we are to protect ourselves.

2) Terrorism is easy: In an operational sense, 9/11 was a complex affair. Most notably, the conspirators needed to learn how to fly commercial jets. Yet as a matter of general principle, it's easy to be a terrorist. Terrorism is the deliberate targeting of non-combatants -- the targeting of unarmed people and institutions. Anyone can commit an act of terrorism at any time.

United 93 helps us understand the total vulnerability of what security experts call soft targets. There are no missile-defence systems around civilian skyscrapers. The movie captures the profound feeling of helplessness that engulfed the air-traffic and military command centres when they realized that the United States was under attack that morning. The whole country was suddenly one big target.

Anything and anybody is a terrorist target -- a day-care centre, a shopping mall, a corner church -- and it's impossible to protect them all. The political lesson is that defensive measures alone are not sufficient to fight militant Islam, not when Islamists define their struggle as a war against civilians. In the short term we can harden some obvious targets, but softer ones will always remain.

So we have to look at anti-terrorism as an offensive and long-term effort. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was a radical attempt to reboot the Middle East, to spark a re-ordering of dysfunctional Arab-Muslim societies in a way that would make room for democratization. The Iraq gamble may ultimately prove too ambitious, but the Americans were right to try.

3) You do what you got to do: United 93 was the only hijacked plane that did not reach its target, and that's because the passengers rose up and tried to storm the cockpit. Why did they rise up? As the movie shows, the passengers learned from phone calls to family on the ground that the other planes had been commandeered into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. It was then that the United 93 passengers knew they weren't turning back to the airport for negotiations. When the enemy is on a suicide mission, your only hope is to destroy him before he destroys you. And so the men and women of United 93 died fighting.

If the Islamists -- those seeking to transform Islam from a religion into an expansionist, messianic, violent, political movement -- gain ascendancy in the Middle East, then the suicide bomber "will become a metaphor for the whole region," as the historian Bernard Lewis has put it. Islamists cannot be negotiated with, mainly because their demands, that we become Muslim or we die, are impossible to meet.

Currently the most dangerous Islamist is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's apocalyptic-minded president who is holding the West hostage with his quest for nuclear weapons. Right now the world is scared, yet still hoping Mr. Ahmadinejad will turn back to the airport, so to speak.

Very soon we will have our United 93 moment and realize this is one airplane we'll have to land ourselves.

Leonard Stern is the Citizen's editorial pages editor.

[Tolik]

Definitely. Thank you.

[Tolik]

Nailed It!
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[A message]

The U.S. invasion of Iraq was a radical attempt to reboot the Middle East, to spark a re-ordering of dysfunctional Arab-Muslim societies in a way that would make room for democratization. The Iraq gamble may ultimately prove too ambitious, but the Americans were right to try.

This is the whole Iraq campaign in a nutshell.

The dumb liberal left should be congratulating President Bush for his actions in Iraq for the mere fact of restraint.

We know what Islam is about and in my opinion we had three choices after 9/11.

The options were;

Surrendering to Islam.

Thoroughly destroying Islam and all who adhere to the politico pseudo Religion.

Or attempt a a forceful reformation of Islam.

Only the third option allow us to sleep at night knowing we did not have to kill hundreds of millions of people and not turn swaths of the earth into radioactive slag.

It is because we are a benevolent country that we chose option 3.

It is because we value life that we chose option 3.

That the left is fantasizing with their own suicidal delusions is why they fail to understand the stakes involved.

History will be written of the great restraint shown by our nation and our President in the time of the current Jihad.

I hope to God option 3 works in the end because the only other solution will be option 2, the utter destruction of Islam and it's adherents.

For the safety and progress of mankind we must succeed in Iraq.

[SuziQ]

From Peter Simpson's article: "That's why well-told stories are so critically important. They may not bring us understanding of why things happen, but they show us why our response to terror is what keeps us free, that we must stand and spit in the face of hate."

So very true!

[GOPJ]

...the passengers learned from phone calls to family on the ground that the other planes had been commandeered into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. It was then that the United 93 passengers knew they weren't turning back to the airport for negotiations. When the enemy is on a suicide mission, your only hope is to destroy him before he destroys you. And so the men and women of United 93 died fighting.

Great read ping...

[SteveSpeaking]

Islam must be crushed. Islam must not be recognized as a religion any more than Nazism was. All Mosques should be declared delinquent of taxes owed retroactive from the day they were built. ANY gathering of Islamics should be PROSECUTED as CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT MASS MURDER, found guilty and deported. Country by country, state by state, town by town, foot by foot, inch by inch, the Islamic cancer must be eradicated.

[fanfan]

Bump

[MoochPooch]

Reading this, I'm reminded of a saying by George Orwell: "The problem with an ideology isn't the belief system, but the people it attracts."

Another British pundit called Islam a "religion for psychopaths." Is Islam inherently violent? Or is it that way because it was created by violent people? I dunno. But something about that part of the world seems to breed these types, who were drawn to Islam like a moth to flame. Unfortunately they take all the flakes, nebs, & sickos with them.

I tend to think these terrorists were narcissists -- people who believed they could play G-d, make their own rules, & go out in technicolor glory. To say, as the author implied, that they had a thought-of cause, is only half-true. They were not selfless "soldiers" -- just a bunch of angry, paranoid cowards who resented the West because it pointed out their own culture's inadequacies.

[GulfWar1Vet]

bump