Posted on 09/11/2001 6:13:39 PM PDT by Pokey78
Terror for all: The day that changed the modern world
By The Editors
The United States, its allies and the civilised world are at war today against an enemy which, while undeclared, is as well organised and as ruthless as any that a modern state has confronted. Four aircraft, simultaneously hijacked and deployed in suicide attacks, have been used to kill thousands of civilians, to destroy two of America’s best known landmarks, to wreck the Pentagon, force the evacuation of the White House and bring the normal business of government to a halt. New Yorkers suffered an urban avalanche; the rest of the world has yet to feel the the consequences.
The immediate result yesterday was to stop business on Wall Street and in southern Manhattan, and to bring turbulence to world financial and oil markets. All that is only the beginning. Even as Americans grieve for their dead and the civilised world grieves with them, the West must recognise what will come after the burials are over. From airports to embassies, from petrol pumps to political hustings, there will be constant reminders of this dreadful day for years to come. The impact on the American mind, on America’s sense of itself and of its duty to others is as yet incalculable. The new truths of a changed world have yet to be seen.
The American dream itself was the target of yesterday’s co-ordinated and deadly terrorist attacks on the most potent symbols of Western political, commercial and military power. But it was more than that; it was an attack on civilised liberal society, designed to force all countries that could conceivably be targets to become, in self-defence, high security states. Very few events, however dramatic, change the political landscape. This will.
As shock and grief give way to a terrible anger, the US will fight back in defence of that dream, determined, in the words of Colin Powell yesterday, that terrorists “will never be allowed to kill our society and our belief in the democratic way”. But it will fight as a nation grimly conscious that it has been tempered by fire and changed, perhaps for ever, by the ordeal. The psychological impact will be greater than that of Japan’s destruction of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and will reach far beyond America’s borders. By comparison with yesterday’s smashing of hijacked American aircraft into American targets, Pearl Harbor was easy to understand; it was for most Americans at the edge of their world. Yesterday there came a true bolt from the blue, aimed to humble the heart of the nation.
The inquests will be swift and harsh. The vulnerability of the United States to terrorist assault was well understood by American leaders and Intelligence officials, although no policymaker could have anticipated that it would be so appallingly demonstrated as it was yesterday or that the country’s huge security apparatus would prove so hopelessly inadequate. But to most Americans, it was an abstract peril.
It is abstract no longer. The most devastating terrorist attack in history has put Manhattan and Foggy Bottom on a footing with Tel Aviv. Stricken along with the thousands of victims in the debris of the collapsed Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Centre and the smouldering Pentagon is a great country’s sense of itself as a continental power ringed by oceans, set apart by geography as well as history and consequently endowed with a large measure of freedom to act for the right. It may take a long time for the United States to recover its identity as the “young nation”, idealistic and politically self-confident, that it has, remarkably, felt itself to be throughout its history.
Much anger will be turned inward. This was a massive security failure. The co-ordinated hijacking of these aircraft was a complex operation. It could not have been carried out without months of preparation or without the involvement of many actors. Almost certainly, pilots as well as hijackers had to be smuggled on board; an American pilot with a gun to his head, knowing that he was going to die anyway, would surely have headed out to sea rather than hit buildings which contained so many fellow citizens. Such an assault must have involved large numbers of communications that America’s formidable signals intelligence was capable of intercepting and did not.
Americans will be shocked that airport security was so lax that multiple hijacks were possible. They can have little confidence today in the huge organisations of state that exist to protect them. It is barely conceivable that even the Pentagon, its roofs bristling with radar and anti-aircraft missiles, should have failed to protect itself from attack — and that it was apparently unprepared for one, almost an hour after the first plane flew into the World Trade Centre. It makes matters no better that lax security is no novelty; the USS Cole was holed last year in port in Aden by a small boat that an alert crew should have searched before it got anywhere near the ship. After the bombings of the American Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, it emerged that State Department officials had repeatedly asked for, and been denied on grounds of cost, additional protection for those and other embassy buildings. Now that bombers have struck with such apparent ease against the heart of American power, the FBI, CIA and the Department of Defence will all find themselves in the dock of indignant public opinion.
George W. Bush finds himself trying out John F. Kennedy’s shoes in circumstances that would test the most mature of politicians. He has fewer obvious courses of action open to him than did that other young and still untried President in 1962, when he was confronted by the Cuban missile crisis. Again, as with Pearl Harbor, Kennedy had a known adversary to deal with. Mr Bush, by contrast, must contend with a “national tragedy” that amounts to an assault on freedom itself and demands a devastating response, but which presents as yet no clear target.
The enormity of what has occurred has given pause to groups which might have hastened to claim “credit” for lesser attacks. Responsibility was at first claimed by the Damascus-based Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine but the DFLP retracted that statement almost immediately. So has Hamas. Yassir Arafat’s condemnation has been accompanied by an offer to help to track down the attackers that, in other suicide bomb attacks, he would have done well not to deny to Israel.
One reason for believing these denials, regardless of motive or past performance, is that it is unlikely that any of the Middle East’s militant Islamists is capable of attacks on this scale. The logistics are more characteristic of the methods of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi extremist sheltered by Taleban who ordered the Kenyan and Tanzanian bombings and may have had a hand in the bombing of the US barracks near Dhahran in 1996. He could have acted alone, or under contract to Saddam Hussein. Iraqi television was yesterday reflecting the regime’s delight. Iranian hardliners will be no less pleased. The Taleban authorities, aware that the finger points in their direction, have been anxious to deflect suspicion away from their protégé; their spokesman has insisted that “we want to tell the American people that Afghanistan feels their pain” and “we hope the terrorists are caught and brought to justice”. But bin Laden is believed on good authority by the editor of Al Quds, the London-based Arab newspaper, to have been planning an attack of unprecedented magnitude on targets in the United States. When he has made such vows before, he has carried them out.
The question for Mr Bush is how most effectively to retaliate. The aim must not merely be to punish but to extinguish the threat. The answer, as Britain knows from long experience in Northern Ireland and as the West found in dealing with the hijackings and bombings of the 1970s, is that there is no single stroke that will slay these invisible enemies, no one riposte that will “take out” this threat. Effective mastery of this terrorist network — and the one certainty is that many people are involved — will require a changed attitude of mind to every aspect of civil as well as military security. It is painstaking work requiring constraints that people will understand in the immediate aftermath but will soon come to resent as infringements of their liberties. Part of the price of vigilance is inconvenience. It is a difficult course for democracies to sustain.
Where there is proof against an individual, group or country, America should take robust military action. But haste brings dangers not merely of hitting the wrong target but of making the dangers worse. It is important to avoid doing anything that would make life any more difficult for moderate Arab governments whose unfeigned horror at what has happened is dictated as much by anxieties about the impact on their own publics as it is by common humanity. These Manhattan murderers will be heroes to Islamist extremists; and even among those who are not, it will be assumed that these were “martyrs” out to punish America for its support of Israel. Rulers such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Jordan’s King Abdullah and the Saudi Royal House will fear the strengthening of anti-Western forces. However irritated Washington has cause to be with their recent play-acting at the Durban conference on racism, America must move with circumspection in this treacherous political terrain.
Mr Bush’s second care must be to ensure that this disaster does not turn Americans in on themselves. Never has there been less good reason; but not for a long time will the temptation have been so great. This disaster has, in the most appalling and unwanted circumstances of national catastrophe, vindicated Mr Bush’s longstanding argument that the end of the Cold War has not ended the threats to American security. It underpins his strategic case for missile defence. These suicide bombers have proved his point about America’s vulnerability. They prove, too, however, that missile defence — as the President has always contended — is only part of a strategy for the defence of the law-abiding against the villainy of outlaw states and groups. The response cannot be retreat.
This carnage has shown that there can be no retreat that does not add to danger. This attack was, as Tony Blair says, not against America alone but part of a battle between terrorism and the entire free world which can be met only by standing shoulder to shoulder. Mikhail Gorbachev famously said that in ending the Cold War he was doing something terrible to the West, depriving it of its enemy. The enemy today is Moscow’s, Western Europe’s, America’s and the law-loving world’s. Against this monstrosity, the grandest of coalitions must be forged if evil is not to prevail.
Democrats should not fight fire with fire
by Simon Jenkins
First the horror. The attacks on the World Trade Centre and Washington yesterday before a horrified world were the most vivid display of terror that I can recall. The heart of darkness had come to the heart of light and wreaked havoc.
New York is a city I love. It is bond-brother of London and cultural capital of a nation that has entered the new millennium as master of the world. That made it a natural target of envy and hatred. Those who question America’s frequent global interventions in the cause of democracy do so always from a position of respect. Leadership demands a price. When that price is paid in such symbolic centres of the nation as New York and Washington, Americans deserve every sympathy. Words may try to explain such events. None can justify them.
After the horror comes the response. The wise general always keeps in mind his enemy’s objective. As with other recent attacks on Americans at home and abroad, the objective here cannot be the traditional one of those who wage violent war. It is not to defeat America, to undermine its economic power or military strength, nor even to damage its political stability. Such goals are unachievable. That is why comparisons with Pearl Harbor are silly. The objective is to publicise a cause, humiliate America and goad her into a violent response.
To achieve this goal requires more than a big bang. It requires that bang to be publicised and for the reaction to it to be equally violent. Its effectiveness lies not in the death toll — a toll repeated daily on the roads — but in the loudness of the echo through the world’s media. It lies in the action replay, the humanising of the tragedy, the publicity for those responsible. It lies in the aftermath.
There is no military defence against attacks such as these. Indeed there is no realistic defence at all. America will doubtless redouble its efforts to penetrate and contain the groups responsible. But they will not be defeated by main force. Any plane can be hijacked. Any building is vulnerable. People can be protected individually but not in the mass. A community can always be gassed or poisoned.
The paradox of new technology is that it makes developed states more vulnerable to random assault. In the war of the weak against the strong, the weak can wield weapons more potent than ever before. Globalisation may render the rich richer and the poor poorer. But it offers the self-appointed champions of the poor devastating means of forcing their attention on the world.
Faced with horrors such as these, “anti-missile” defence systems seem suddenly obsolete. No rogue state needs an intercontinental ballistic missile to assault America when a boy with a suitcase or a suicide hijacker can walk through any shield. A trillion dollars hurled into outer space cannot stop the blast of a civilian jet loaded with fuel out of Boston airport. Fylingdales may detect a menace from outer space, but not a virus in a handbag or a madman in Club Class.
To protect every American building is clearly impossible. To attempt to protect city centres against suicide attack plays the attacker’s game. It awards him the attention he craves, the apotheosis of fame. The constant search for security becomes a ghostly re-enactment of the outrage, a reminder and a challenge to next time. That surely is why the World Trade Centre was targeted for a second time. It added an eerie echo to the “ripple” of the terror. Its power lies in the memory of blood-stained bodies and sobbing women, of shattered buildings and a world turned upside down.
If yesterday’s acts were committed under the sponsorship of a foreign state, retaliation might be understandable. But punitive action requires a collective entity that can be held responsible. Here there are only shadowy groups, moving from country to country, terrifying their hosts as much as the rest of the world. In 1993 the World Trade Centre was the victim of a massive car bomb. It appeared to be the work of Arab fundamentalists with ties to Afghanistan and Sudan. No conceivable response to the attack made any sense, except to track down the individuals concerned. They appear to have struck again.
Nor did any good come from putting states such as Syria, Iraq, Libya, Iran and Sudan on a list of countries “responsible for sponsoring state terrorism”. Trade sanctions were imposed on destitute peoples with primitive political economies. Sanctions entrenched and often enriched those already in power. To sponsor anti-Americanism has long been a guarantee of dictatorial longevity, witness Assad of Syria, Castro of Cuba, Gaddafi of Libya and Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
The ardent non-interventionist might argue that incidents such as these can be avoided. They would plead with America not to intervene everywhere and thus render its territory a target to all whom its government has offended abroad. This argument must be met since many enemies of America will cite it. They will point out that the scenes on television yesterday were different only in degree from those experienced by civilian victims of American bombing in Yugoslavia and Iraq. Those critical of Nato bombing might offer America more sympathy if Nato had offered sympathy for the hundreds of civilian deaths from its missiles and cluster bombs far from home. US generals openly demanded the bombing of civilian targets in Belgrade and Baghdad, to “break the will” of local people. Is that not what the perpetrators of yesterday’s outrage might say? Here we tread warily. Sponsoring the state of Israel led America into a prolonged and senseless hostility to the cause of the dispossessed Palestinians. The financing of anti-Soviet warlords in Afghanistan in the 1980s armed and galvanised terrorist groups, including Osama bin Laden and others behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre. The criminalisation by the Americans of the trade in heroin and cocaine, of which America is the major consumer, ensures that crime triumphs in states throughout Asia and South America. The continuance of the Kuwaiti policing operation into weekly bombing of Iraq has made Saddam a regional hero and America an object of regional hatred.
These were not wise policies. The true policeman does not just project his awesome authority across the globe, he thinks through the consquences of his policy. But that is an issue distinct from yesterda’'s events. The new Anglo-American “moral imperium” may be no less imperial than the old one, but I do not believe it to be cynical. The bombing of the Serbs and Iraqis was undertaken in the cause of peace. It was without self-interest on Nato’s part.
America and its allies have “taken up the white man’s burden” with honest intent. They have done so aware of Kipling’s feared reward, “the blame of those ye better,/ The hate of those ye guard”. The wrong turns of Western policy in the Middle East may help to explain yesterday’s slaughter. They in no way excuse it. Nobody should want to see America terrorised into isolationism.
To seek revenge would be senseless. America showed after attacks on its East African embassies in 1998 that it regards revenge as a legitimate weapon in its geopolitical arsenal. The bombing of Afghanistan was ineffective. That of Sudan was illegal and militarily indefensible. Revenge is not the response of a sophisticated political community. America above all should know Thomas Paine’s plea, to “lay the axe to the root and teach governments humanity . . . sanguinary punishments corrupt mankind”.
To react to an atrocity by abandoning the customary self-control of democracy is to help the terrorist to do his work. He wants America to behave as the regional bully of local demonology. To extend further America’s Middle East economic santions, isolation and military aggression offers succour to the terrorist. These policies have not hastened the spread of democracy or stability through the region. They have, if anything, done the reverse. They should be replaced with policies of engagement, trade, friendship and contact.
The message of yesterday’s incident is that, for all its horror, it does not and must not be allowed to matter. It is a human disaster, an outrage, an atrocity, an unleashing of the madness of which the world will never be rid. But it is not politically significant. It does not tilt the balance of world power one inch. It is not an act of war. America’s leadership of the West is not diminished by it. The cause of democracy is not damaged, unless we choose to let it be damaged.
Maturity lies in learning to live, and sometimes die, with the madmen.
The 'end of history' replaced by a 'clash of civilisations'
American political opinion will now swiftly polarise between unilateralism and isolationism
By TIM HAMES
George Washington concluded his farewell address to the American people with the solemn admonishment that “it is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances, with any portion of the foreign world”. The critical political question in the aftermath of an attack without precedent in American history is how, after the initial period of shock and demands for effective retaliation, leaders and citizens in the United States react. Will they decide, as they have determined in the past, that the outside world is an inherently hostile place to be avoided at all cost? Or will Republican and Democratic politicians regard this assault as a de facto declaration of war which demands a prolonged, dedicated, continuous military solution? Any illusions that the end of the Cold War has ushered in a new era of permanent peace and prosperity will have been shattered yesterday. The idea of an End of History hailed vociferously by Francis Fukuyama in the opening year of George Bush Sr’s presidency 12 years ago has been rendered entirely redundant. The instincts of policymakers will instead be to dust off another text, The Clash of Civilisations, written by Samuel Huntingdon in 1993, which prophesied a showdown between the democratic forces led by the US and radical zealots rooted in extreme Islam which would confront American values with violence.
President Bush has been confronted with a crisis on a scale of any of those faced by his postwar predecessors. It is, in a sense, far more taxing still. When his father ordered the liberation of Kuwait, he was taking on a known enemy, Iraq, with a defined set of borders in a conventional armed engagement in a clear location, Kuwait. When John F. Kennedy duelled with Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban missiles standoff, the Cold War had at least begun to evolve a set of informal rules and he enjoyed a hotline and back-channels with which to deal with the Soviet Union. This President, by contrast, faces an unknown enemy operating by no known rules and no obvious means by which he can attempt to confront this network of terrorism. The world’s most powerful nation is obliged to rely on “intelligence” in a part of the world where that term is little more than an elaborate metaphor for guesswork and rumour.
It is this numbing complexity which makes the inevitable comparisons with Pearl Harbor quite inappropriate. The profound sense of shock and surprise is certainly the same now as 60 years ago, but the political options for the man in the White House are not the same as those which Franklin Roosevelt encountered. It was absolutely obvious what he should do and no doubt that Americans would answer the call to arms. Mr Bush can mobilise national outrage but cannot know how he should then seek to direct it.
There is a certain cruel irony in the President being rushed from an elementary school in Florida, where he was reading to young people, to Nebraska to attempt to deal with this series of catastrophes. His enforced flight symbolises the instant violent jolt from the worthy mundanity of domestic politics in what has been, even in a year when the word “recession” has been whispered in so many quarters, a time of comfort, to face a policy challenge of a scale beyond comprehension.
The President will draw some comfort from the experience of the team which surrounds him. The immediate reaction of the American public will be to rally round the flag, support the Administration, and offer unanimous backing for whatever retaliation Mr Bush can order. This unity, although sincere, will also be superficial. It will mask a furious internal debate that has rumbled beneath the surface in the seminar rooms of Washington think-tanks for a decade, but which could shortly become the dominant issue in American life.
Mr Bush came into office determined, despite his own inexperience in international affairs, to reverse the direction that foreign policy had taken under the Clinton Administration. President Clinton, inspired in part by the “end of history” outlook, attempted to replace the “containment” doctrine of the Cold War with a programme to promote democracy and markets. This ethos led the United States to commit political capital in virtually every corner of the world in an attempt to design and then implement peace settlements. To its enthusiasts, this approach provided America with a moral mission. The critics, led by those who serve Mr Bush today, looked down on it as a form of “foreign policy as social work”. There are many Democrats, sitting in Congress and elsewhere, who privately concurred with this scathing assessment.
What backing was left for the Clinton approach to the outside world has evaporated. There will be little faith in Washington for shuttle diplomacy, the promotion of US interests via the “soft power” of cultural example, or multilateral peacekeeping expeditions through the United Nations, after this outrage.
The unknown element is which of two competing doctrines — unilateralism or isolationism — will become the new orthodoxy. Both strains have ample representation in Congress and in each party. The unilateralists will argue that the United States must reshape the entirety of its foreign policy on the assumption that the tragic events in New York and Washington are but the first, intense, shots in what is a life-or-death struggle to ensure that ordinary American life can be sustained in future.
They will urge the President to put all other considerations to one side and take on the terrorists, not in one series of raids but in all-out conflict. They will brush aside qualms which might be expressed by European leaders or Middle Eastern rulers. Americans will look to their traditional friends, such as this country, for support and largely base their international strategy on which outside nations choose to rally to Washington. Tony Blair must have assumed that the question of whether or not to hold a referendum on the euro would be the defining foreign policy dilemma of his second term in Downing Street. It is no exaggeration to speculate that, instead, his principal concern could be how to respond to a wholely new international order born of terrorism.
If that seems unattractive, then Mr Blair will appreciate that it is less unappealing than its alternative. For there will be many Americans who will seek to pull down the shutters and withdraw, as far as it is possible, from the theatre of international relations. If there is any coherent strategy at all behind this attack, beyond the most shocking possible demonstration of pure hatred for America, it is the belief that the US can be driven back into its borders, withdrawing from the Middle East, in particular leaving its ally Israel exposed alone to its fanatical enemies.
This is not, unfortunately, an irrational if sadistic blueprint. The nativist streak in US culture is strong and has been captured by political advocates in fields as diverse as the deployment of troops overseas, trade pacts such as Nafta, or immigration. These causes have so far, in the post- Cold War era, been articulated by figures such as Pat Buchanan, Jerry Brown or Ross Perot, who could be dismissed as fanatics on the fringe rather than serious contenders for national office. It is perfectly possible that a more respectable advocate of a more sophisticated version of isolationism will come forward.
Mr Bush will certainly lean towards unilateralism tempered with some diplomacy. The foreign policy “establishment” in the United States will close ranks behind that position. But the capacity of the old guard in Washington to impose an international agenda on a compliant electorate has collapsed in the past decade. There is no certainty as to whose voice articulating which message will emerge from this cacophony. Not only American foreign, but domestic, policy has been ripped asunder in a matter of hours.
This might seem a stark, even hyperbolic, statement. A cursory analysis of American history would suggest, nonetheless, that it is not overstated. Washington’s farewell words to his fellow countrymen were a deliberate intervention in a fierce contemporary controversy. The first American party system, which was emerging as Washington left office, was structured around three arguments: the extent to which power in the Republic should rest with the Federal Government or the states, the degree to which the United States should aspire to be a mercantile or an agricultural state, and the extent to which Americans would engage in or keep their distance from the outside world.
In the course of two centuries the names of US political parties have changed, but these underlying fundamentals have endured. The high degree of internal consensus which occurred in the Cold War was, in truth, a departure from the normal practice of American political discourse. Foreign affairs have, from George Washington onwards, divided Americans. These issues strike at a central uncertainty: whether the New World regards itself as a retreat from the Old World or as an example to it.
Mr Bush, after eight months, has been presented with the defining moment of his presidency. He might chew over a further sentiment from Washington’s final speech as President: “There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favours from nation to nation.”
Arab leaders may be the ultimate victims of this terrorist assault
BY MICHAEL BINYON
Any Middle East leader who has ties to America must today be fearing for his throne. The worst terrorist attack in history has demonstrated not only a ruthlessness and co-ordination unseen so far in the many terrorist atrocities spawned by the Middle East; it has also highlighted the powerlessness and irrelevance of moderation and diplomacy in the face of naked hatred and thirst for revenge.
The Arab rulers who have embraced the peace process are as shocked and fearful as any world leader, and have more to lose. For the target of the suicide hijackers was not just the Twin Towers and the Pentagon; it was the whole framework of peace with Israel and its embrace by political leaders within the Middle East. The only people strengthened — temporarily — by yesterday’s terror are the radical anti-Western leaders of Iraq, Libya and Syria who have encouraged attacks, verbal or physical, on America.
They may, in the long run, pay a heavy price. America will have few qualms now about striking at any government tainted by terrorism, even those such as Syria and Libya which claim to have renounced their terrorist past and now embrace “moderation”. President Saddam Hussein of Iraq may be rejoicing in this mother of all catastrophes, basking in the acclaim of the militants now cheering the outrage in New York. But George W. Bush may not now wait for an excuse to complete his father’s Gulf War business and bomb the man seen as responsible for backing America’s enemies.
More immediate panic will be felt by the Arab moderates — many of whom have become remote from their people and unable to reflect the anti-Israel passions that have been brewing for a year. Both Egypt and Jordan still have Israeli Ambassadors on their soil, despite growing popular demands for their expulsion. President Mubarak and King Abdullah II of Jordan are seen by Islamic radicals as American puppets, leaders who are unable to sway opinion in Washington and unwilling to confront America over its support for the Sharon Government in Israel.
They will need all their skills, and intelligence services, to hold in check the extremes of emotion unleashed by yesterday’s cataclysms. They will not be protected by any understanding that they have repeatedly warned Washington of the dangers of drift; instead, they will feel the need to protect themselves and their peoples on the one hand from an outpouring of anti-American vitriol and on the other from possible American retaliation against any targets in their own countries.
Other rulers too will be aghast. The Gulf states, whose economies depend on oil sales to the West and which have long been the target of Islamic extremism, will want to distance themselves from a wounded America, even as they express abhorrence for the terrorism and sympathy for the many casualties.
The link between terrorism, anti-Americanism and Islamic extremism has not yet been proved. But the suspicion that the perpetrators will have been motivated by religious as well as political zeal will make it all the harder for moderate Arab rulers to keep a balance. No country will salute the men who carried out such actions; but many people in the Arab world will be privately rejoicing that America has at last been made to suffer for what most Arabs regards as its blinkered pro-Israel policy.
The rulers of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and most of the Gulf states now face a painful unmasking as men unable to influence events or stop the cycle of violence and counter-violence that has led to such a terrible disaster. Most Arab countries, while urging America to get involved in the region, were also doing their best to stay uninvolved, knowing that any escalation could lead to war and that any war could lead to their own defeat.
Only last week King Abdullah II spoke of his country’s ability to survive, relatively unscathed, despite the turmoil and killing on the other side of the River Jordan. His security services have tried to enforce calm in his kingdom, just as President Mubarak has clamped down on any signs of trouble in Egypt. But both men must now fear that the coalition of anti-Western forces, co-ordinated with such deadly effect for this operation, may prove a powerful motivating factor within their own countries. They cannot remain unscathed for long.
The Arab leaders know that the only answer to a Hydra-headed terrorism, generating new cells with every retaliatory strike, is the old and stale formula of a just and comprehensive peace. There is no prospect of that for the moment, and no point in urging it on America. The United States is not in a mood to listen to the Arabs, even to its Arab friends. They must fend for themselves, bowing to the mood even as they send their police to round up all known radicals, extremists and those preaching jihad against America. They, and all the Middle East, have much to fear from yesterday’s atrocities.
The first editorial spoke of President Bush's belief in the need for missile defense and the realization that the Cold War did not end threats to America's freedom. Over time, circumstances have occurred that reinforced President Bush's vision for America. He wanted to change the tone in Washington. What an extraordinary scene at the Capitol this evening when several members of Congress spontaneously broke out in "God Bless America" after an address by House Speaker Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Daschle.
Whether you believe in God's divine hand upon our Nation or not, I believe that events are occurring on God's timetable, much to many FReepers' frustrations, but things are occurring and accomplishing a purpose that only time and God will reveal to us. I urge all of my fellow FReepers to be patient in their dealings with one another when speculating on motives of our various leaders (Ashcroft, Bush, military, etc.). Something is happening. Let's continue to pray, without malice, for the proper outcome.
Hogwash. Get the perpetrators and those who support them.
So legalising drugs etc... and kowtowing to every (and this is the crux of the matter) morally unsound nation and/or individual will mean that no-one gets upset or hurt... it sounds eerily like the threats of someone holding up a gas store, only these are threats coming from allegedly our own side! Through this he also implies this terrible tragedy is the US' own fault?
What is it with the those who are liberal? They term themselves following liberty, but don't even begin to understand the fundamentals of the aforesaid, sometimes you can't take both sides, sometimes you know what is right and what is wrong, and if you profess not to understand morality, or seek to question what it is, then perhaps you should try living real life where you don't have the luxury. You can't not step on other peoples toes, everyone effects everyone else's free space with their oppinions, it's liberal nonsense that you can "Accomodate" everyone, and everyone will be happy. Free speach is good, but leadership's purpose isn't to listen to every free speaker, it's to lead, the US has to lead.
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