A WAR FOR CIVILISATION

Exactly a quarter-century ago, I was pottering about the kitchen when the newsman broke into the morning show to say that there were reports that a 'plane had flown into the World Trade Center. I assumed it was an unfortunate mishap by a Piper Cub from Long Island or some such, switched off the radio and went about my business. So I did not hear that a second 'plane had hit until twenty minutes later when two of my editors called from London and Toronto to demand instant-reaction columns to events of which I was not aware. I switched on the television to find the familiar New York skyline full of smoke. I had been expecting delivery of a sofa that morning, and half-an-hour or so later it duly arrived. So I muted the TV and turned to face the chaps to discuss where to set it. When I turned back to the screen, the skyline was no longer there. For a moment, I was too befuddled to comprehend what had happened - and the scale of what America's enemies had accomplished. This is my ancient column from that day, composed in the hours that followed, when very little was known. There are passages I would write differently today, and some I would not write at all, but I thought we would re-publish it as is, with the original (Spectator) illustration and headline.

This is a re-publication of the column he wrote on 9.11

With some commentary

Prescient.

We are fools.

I had been expecting delivery of a sofa that morning, and half-an-hour or so later it duly arrived. So I muted the TV and turned to face the chaps to discuss where to set it. When I turned back to the screen, the skyline was no longer there. For a moment, I was too befuddled to comprehend what had happened - and the scale of what America's enemies had accomplished.

This is my ancient column from that day, composed in the hours that followed, when very little was known. There are passages I would write differently today, and some I would not write at all, but I thought we would re-publish it as is, with the original (Spectator) illustration and headline. It was and is "a war for civilisation", but in ways I did not fully grasp until six months later, standing across the street from a Viennese maternity shop.

So here we are, a generation later, when no jihadist needs to fly planes into western skyscrapers - because, in New York as in London as in other western capitals, we have handed Islam the keys to those skyscrapers. In the excerpts from the flight manifests that appeared over the next few days, I was struck by the name of Christine Hanson of Groton, Massachusetts, a two-year-old girl sitting between her parents on a doomed flight. She was last heard crying in the background during her father's telephone call to her grandparents to report that the stewardess had been stabbed. Christine would be approaching thirty now - and I cannot but feel that the intervening years have dishonoured her memory:

~You can understand why they're jumping up and down in the streets of the Middle East, jubilant in their victory. They have struck a mighty blow against the Great Satan, mightier than even the producers of far-fetched action thrillers could conceive. They have driven a gaping wound into the heart of his military headquarters. They have ruptured the most famous skyline in the world, the glittering monument to his decadence. They have killed and maimed thousands of his subjects, live on TV. For one day they reduced the hated Bush to a pitiful presidential vagrant, bounced further and further from his White House to ever more remote military airports, from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska by a security staff which obviously understands less about the power of symbolism than America's enemies do.

And, for those on the receiving end, that 'money shot', as they call it in Hollywood — the smoking towers of the World Trade Center collapsing as easily as condemned chimneys at an abandoned sawmill — represents not just an awesome loss of life but a ghastly intelligence failure by the US and a worse moral failure by the West generally.

There was a grim symmetry in the way this act of war interrupted the President at a grade-school photo-op. The federal government has no constitutional responsibility for education: it is a state affair, delegated mostly to tiny municipal school boards. But one of Bill Clinton's forlorn legacies is that the head of state and the commander-in-chief of the most powerful nation on earth must now fill his day with trivial initiatives designed to soothe the piffling discontents of soccer moms and other preferred demographics of the most pampered generation in history: programs to connect elementary schools to the Internet, prescription drug benefits for seniors. government 'lock-boxes' for any big-ticket entitlement the focus groups decide they can't live without, and a thousand and one other woeful trivialities.

And so the President was reminded of his most awesome responsibility at a time when he was discharging his most footling. The first charge of any government is the defence of its borders — and, without that, it makes no difference how great your prescription drug plan is. In that sense, Tuesday marked the end of the ten-year-long weekend off that the world's only superpower has enjoyed since Colin Powell advised against marching on Baghdad. The post-Cold War interlude is over, an era of follies — OJ, Monica — and fatuities, a few of which Tuesday's horror stories cruelly underlined: employees in wheelchairs, whom Bob Dole's Americans with Disabilities Act and the various lobby groups insist can do anything able-bodied people can, found themselves trapped on the 80th floor, unable to get downstairs, unable even to do as others did and hurl themselves from the windows rather than be burned alive.

The first named victim I was aware of was Barbara Olson, the wife of the solicitor-general, whom I sat next to at dinner a few weeks ago. She was one of the 'blonde former prosecutors', which sounds like a rock band but was the standard shorthand for the good-looking female commentators who turned up on CNN every night during impeachment — she was smart, witty, a fearless scourge of the Clinton administration. She'd postponed her trip to California by a day so she could wish her husband a happy birthday on Tuesday morning, and so found herself on American Airlines flight 11. She had time to call her husband Ted to tell him her plane was being hijacked and that she had been hustled to the back of the cabin with the other passengers and flight crew. By then, the solicitor-general knew that two planes had deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center. He told Barbara what was happening — that she wasn't in the hands of some jerk who wants his pals sprung from jail and a jet to Cuba but cooler customers with bigger plans. A few seconds later her flight ripped through one side of the Pentagon.

I'm sure that Ted Olson, in the course of the day, saw some of those TV pictures of taxi-drivers, merchants and schoolchildren in Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine passing out candy to celebrate the death of his wife and thousands of others. This is not terrorism — five guys in ski-masks plotting in a basement. This is war, waged in the shadows but openly cheered by millions and millions of people and more covertly supported by their governments, including the smooth, bespoke emissaries of the thug states in Durban last week. America lost 2,403 people at Pearl Harbor, 2,260 in the war of 1812, 4,435 in the entire Revolutionary War, and 4,710 on the worst day of the Civil War. It is entirely possible that the final loss on Tuesday will exceed those totals combined. That's war.

What matters now is how the US reacts. President Bush, echoing a long line of British prime ministers responding to IRA attacks, called the perpetrators 'a faceless coward'. 'Cowardly,' agreed Rudy Giuliani, and Jim Baker. Those prime ministers were wrong and so are the President, the former secretary of state, and the mayor of New York. The men or women who do such things are certainly faceless but are not, I think, cowards. A coward would not agree to hijack a plane. Many others might do it for, oh, $20 million, a change of identity and retirement in the Bahamas: those would be the stakes if life was run by Warner Brothers or Paramount and the terrorist was played by John Travolta or Bruce Willis. But very few of us would agree to hijack a plane for the certainty of instant, violent death. We should acknowledge that at the very least it requires a kind of mad courage, a courage 99 per cent of those of us in the West can never understand and, because of that, should accord a certain respect. Assuming (as Barbara Olson's phone call seems to confirm) that no United or American Airlines flight crew would plough into a crowded building even with a gun at their heads, the men who took over the controls were sophisticated, educated people, perhaps even trained jet pilots who could be pulling down six-figure salaries in most countries but preferred instead to drive a plane through crowded offices in one all-or-nothing crazed gesture. If these men were cowards, this would be an easier war. Instead, they are not just willing to die for their cause, but anxious to do so.

And what causes are we willing to die for? By 'we', I mean 'the West', though in truth these days that umbrella doesn't cover a lot — the United Kingdom, most of the time; France, when it suits them; Canada, hardly at all, not in any practical sense. Even America's sense of purpose has shrivelled away since the Gulf War: why was there such a comprehensive intelligence failure? Is it because the US has come to rely too much on electronic surveillance and has virtually eliminated human intelligence — the old-fashioned spies who go into deep cover at great risk to themselves? And is the delusion that you can fight terrorism with computers from outer space just another wretched example of the nouveau warfare pioneered by Mr Clinton in Kosovo? Or, to be more accurate, not in Kosovo but far above it, and then only after dark on clear nights, dropping Tomahawks at a million bucks a pop on empty buildings. One quasi-governmental network of killers can find four fellows who can fly a jet willing to commit suicide on the same day, but the Clinton doctrine tells the world that the greatest military power on the face of the earth no longer has the stomach for a single body-bag. The doughboys of the Great War went off singing, 'We won't come back till it's over/Over There!' But not Mr Clinton's army: 'We won't go over till it's over/Over There!' In Kosovo, America declared it was prepared to kill, but not to die. Their enemies drew the correct lesson.

There are cowards elsewhere, too. The funniest moment in the early coverage came when some portentous anchor solemnly reported that 'the United Nations building had not been hit'. Well, there's a surprise! Why would the guys who took out the World Trade Center and the Pentagon want to target the UN? The UN is dominated by their apologists, and in some cases the friends of the friends of the fellows who did this (to put it at its most discreet). All last week the plenipotentiaries of the West were in Durban holed up with the brutes and treating them as equals, negotiating over how many anti-Zionist insults they could live with and over how abject the West's apology for past sins should be. Tuesday's sobering coda to Durban let us know that those folks on the other side are really admirably straightforward; they mean what they say, and we should take them at their word.

There is a long-term lesson, too. The US is an historical anomaly: the first non-imperial superpower. Britain, France and the other old powers believed in projecting themselves, both territorially and culturally. As we saw in Durban, they get few thanks for that these days. But the American position — that the pre-eminent nation on earth can collectively leap into its Chevy Suburban and drive to the lake while the world goes its own way — is untenable. The consequence, as we now know, is that the world comes to you.

Instead of an empire, the US belongs to Nato, a defence pact of prosperous Western nations in which only one guy picks up the tab, a military alliance for countries that no longer in any recognisable sense have militaries. The US taxpayer's willingness to pay for the defence of Canada and Europe has contributed to the decay of America's so-called 'allies', freeing them to disband their armed forces, flirt with dictators and gangster states, and essentially convert themselves to semi-non-aligned.

The British no doubt will respond by pointing out how lax American security is, compared to Heathrow or even Waterloo Station. And they're right. Granted, every democratic government knows that sometime somewhere some killer will wiggle through the system. But yesterday all the killers got through. Had the conspirators attempted to seize four planes but succeeded in taking only three, we could have consoled ourselves with the knowledge that we had merely a 75% failure rate. But they successfully commandeered every plane they aimed for: a 100% systemic failure.

The killers picked their point of embarkation well: Boston's Logan Airport is a joke. It is, first of all, not an airport but a building site, and has been for years, a maze of extremely permanent temporary signs, construction sheeting and makeshift walkways, all adding to the chaos. I wasn't catching a flight a couple of weeks back, just meeting one, but it was delayed and I wanted a coffee and newspaper and discovered I had to go through to the "secured" area to get them. Overwhelmed by unnecessarily increased traffic, the security guards could give only a cursory glance to most bags, and a few sailed through the scanner while their eyes were elsewhere. At Logan, "airport security" is an oxymoron.

So let the British gloat: they've got great security systems. But on the other hand what was the point, given that they've decided to surrender slowly, piece by piece, to the IRA? When a great power is faced with a terrorist enemy, it has to win – fast and decisively. It has to identify the leaders, remove them silently and ruthlessly, shred their infrastructure and thus deny them the kind of victories that encourage civilian supporters to think their cause is a going concern. In the Fifties, the British did that in Malaya and saved that country from Communism. A decade later, when the IRA re-emerged, they no longer had the stomach for it.

Let us hope that America doesn't show the same lack of will, This is, as the German government put it, an attack on 'the civilised world', and it's time to speak up in its defence. Those Western nations who spent last week in Durban finessing and nuancing evil should understand now that what is at stake is whether the world's future will belong to liberal democracy and the rule of law, or to darker forces. And after Tuesday America is entitled to ask its allies not for finely crafted UN resolutions but a more basic question: whose side are you on?

~from The National Post and The Spectator, September 12th/13th 2002

The above column is as it appeared in print, including a few things I was wrong about. The death toll: more than Pearl Harbor and the War of 1812 but less than the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Upon reflection, I was misguided about the "courage" of the suicide bombers: that's a western way of looking at things, and I was not yet sufficiently immersed in the psychoses of Islam and its perverted death-cultism, in which before committing mass murder one carefully prepares one's genitals because paradise is a brothel. Many readers objected to the passage about the Americans with Disabilities Act, but the stories of the disabled were among the most heart-wrenching of the day, including the account of the able-bodied man who stayed – and perished - with his wheelchair-bound friend because he could not bear to leave him and let him die alone. So we sue small mom'n'pop businesses because their general store in a remote rural town of 500 people has no wheelchair ramp, but we cheerfully encourage the disabled to work on the 80th floor of skyscrapers whose first move in an emergency is to shut down the elevators.

Everything else – the ugliness of "the Arab street", the uselessness of Nato, the self-loathing of the west, the incompetence of Logan Airport, America's high-tech but ineffectual warmongering – is largely unchanged today.

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