Posted on 10/02/2001 2:39:46 PM PDT by laureldrive
Following the Script
September 18, 2001
Assuming that Osama bin Laden directed the 9/11 attack, how does he feel today?
Is he sitting in a cave biting his nails and moaning: “Oh dear! What have I done? Now the Americans are really angry, and they are only too likely to strike back! Why didn’t I think of that possibility?”
Or is he saying: “Just as we hoped. Bush is following the script we wrote. Of course we knew the Americans would take the bait! That was our whole design! Soon there will be open war between the infidels and Islam”?
If this is war, it makes World War II look as quaint as an eighteenth-century pistol duel at 20 paces. Our enemy is not a state with a central nervous system we can strike at, but a vexingly decentralized organization. It’s a perverse twist on the principles of the free market and federalism, and President Bush, threatening to “eradicate” terrorism, is rather like a socialist central planner threatening to eradicate a black market.
Meanwhile, the United States is taking frantic precautions, at enormous cost, to prevent the recurrence of a unique event. Whatever the enemy has up its sleeve, it won’t do the same thing next time. Knowing we are now on guard against quadruple hijackings, it will find another way to surprise us.
We are dealing with men who are willing to die in order to hurt us. Tough talk may console the American public, but it’s entirely beside the point. What is the use of threatening fanatics with violence? What is it about the word “suicide” we don’t understand?
Moreover, the 9/11 attack may mark a dreadful threshold. The whole world has now seen that the sole remaining superpower is by no means invulnerable. This can only encourage other potential enemies to try their hand. It’s rather like the four-minute mile: as soon as one man broke it, everyone did. It no longer seemed the outer limit of human achievement. From now on we must watch our backs everywhere on earth.
Since the real enemy is elusive, the natural response of a wounded state is to seek a tangible target — another state — to strike at. So our government is holding the Afghan government responsible for harboring bin Laden and is threatening military reprisals unless he is captured and given up to the United States.
This assumes that the rulers of Afghanistan know exactly where bin Laden is and can easily arrest him, if only they want to. Should we make war on such a dubious assumption? If we do, we may find ourselves fighting the entire Muslim world, roughly a billion people, with incalculable consequences, and with Osama bin Laden and his cohorts fading into the background of a third world war. Our primary mission will become subduing countless people who have nothing to do with him, but who will be united in their hatred of us. The original cause may be almost forgotten, as we pay a vastly greater price for the war than we paid last week.
World War II began with the invasion of Poland; fifty million deaths later, it ended with Poland in the firm possession of one of the aggressors. The irony was lost on the exhausted Western “victors.”
“That men set off a course of events they can neither calculate nor control,” wrote the great Shakespeare commentator A.C. Bradley, “is a tragic fact.” Nearly every war turns out to be far more than we bargained for. The Gulf War seemed like an easy victory, at the time; we won in a few weeks, and for ten years we thought we were living happily ever after. Now it appears to have made us implacable and cunning enemies.
Of course the enemy doesn’t know how events will play out either, but it is too reckless to care. It represents the nemesis of the modern state, too weak to conquer but satisfied with the stupendous disruption it can achieve. And because that enemy is not a state, there is probably no coin in which it can be repaid.
The enemy has done the unexpected. Our own government has done only the expected. There is no doubt who is winning, or who holds the upper hand.
Odd, how in reality, we have been building allies and obtaining permissions.
I suspect that with winter coming and millions of Afghans facing starvation, tha Taliban will fold without a shot fired by us. The Muslims have a thing about killing their own, and Ben Laden is shaping up to be a mass murderer of Muslims.
50,000 dead at the WTC.
Given what happened in Kenya, when the Kenyans blamed the US for making them targets when Radical Muslims attacked our embassy there and Kenyans died, they may have anticipated that all of the US's allies would have turned on the US in anger over the deaths of their nationals at the WTC.
1000 dead at the Pentagon.
The WH destroyed, and GWB dead.
The grounded 11 planes destroying whatever their targets were.
The resultant complete paralysis of the US economy, government , and military, leading to-
Massive social unrest in the US.
In short, if they truly believed that Allah would give them a great victory and complete success, with the scenario and its end result as I've sketched (and I know that's just my conjecture) then Bin Laden may not have some great master plan at all. He may truly have thought that the US was going to be destroyed on Sept 11th, because "Allah wills it."
Be careful what you wish for world.
The professional pseudo conservative Bush haters each day since 20 Jan get to be harder to distinguish between their drivel and hate mantras from the drivel and hate mantras that comes out the left wing extremists camps!
Sobran, Kristol, Rockwell and et al remind me of little hissing and snarling possums standing in the express way of life. They snarl and hiss at express buses and big rigs before they become carbon based mini bumps and soon just a dirty greasy spot. It would really be interesting to see who bankrolls these clowns. The old follow the money routine!
The 9/11 event has them imploding and destroying themselves just like the left wingers, Maher, Jennings and others!
GW, don't honk the horn or hit the brakes when these snarling and hissing possums popup on the roadway. Keep on doing your job! Oops there goes another loser, er possum!
There is absolutely no use in threatening fanatics with violence. There's a great deal of use in killing them.
They're welcome to commit suicide if they like. But those who want to take others with them need vigorous and merciless assistance.
He writes well, but many of his opinions are pretty kooky.
Joe Sobran is a columnist whose main axe to grind is his theory that the plays of William Shakespeare were written, not by Shakespeare, but by SOMEONE ELSE WITH THE SAME NAME!
I have been surprised and disappointed by his columns since 911- I think he is on the wrong track, and "defeatism" is DEFINITELY the wrong track today.
Go back and look at how weak this country was, in military terms, at the outbreak of WW II ( for us- that is, December 7th, 1941). Of course, AFTER we won that war, it was "obvious" to everyone that we were destined to prevail- but I wonder how "obvious" that was to the people who were actually around then?
We can not guarantee victory- we can only DESERVE victory (thanks , Mr Churchill!).
The level of ignorance, silly gingoism and theatrical chest beating on this thread and many others at FR is appalling.
All you bigtime warriors, I can't help but notice, are sitting in front of your personal computers braying the ultimate in nonsense, idolizing Dubya, a favored and feckless child Geezer Bush managed to sober up in time to usher into the WH courtesy, in part, of all the payments for inside deals from his work for the Carlyle Group he managed to funnel to sonny boy's campaign. Oh, and I just bet the BINLADEN GROUP, business partners of the Bush family, kicked into too!
How blind you all are to Big Brother's fist even as it's coming straight at you!
I think Big Brother's fist has already connected. Just say no to coherence, eh?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.