To all,
A few thoughts of the day. Very unedited and somewhat rough to say the least.
Our moral posturing about our degradation is merely
embarrassing. We have been made fools of, expertly and calculatedly, in
the one of greatest military defeats the country has suffered since we fled from
Viet Nam. The Moslem world is laughing and dancing in the streets.
The casualty figures aren't in, 10,000 dead seems reasonable, and we
wring our hands and speak of grief therapy.
We cannot stop it from happening again. Thousands of aircraft
constantly use O'Hare, a few minutes flying time from the Sears Tower.
Some of our politicians and talking heads speak of "a cowardly act of
terrorism. " It was neither cowardly nor, I think, terrorism. Hijacking an
aircraft and flying it into a building isn't cowardly. Would you do it? It
requires great courage and dedication -- which our enemies have.
One may mince words, but to me the attack looked like an act of
WAR. Not having bombing craft of their own, they used ours. When we
bombed Hanoi and Hamburg, was that terrorism?
The attack was beautifully conceived and executed. These guys are
good. They were clearly looking to inflict the maximum humiliation on the
United States, in the most visible way possible, and they did. The sight of
those two towers collapsing will leave no ones mind. If we do nothing of
importance in return, the entire earth will see that some in our nation are epicenes.
Silly cruise-missile attacks on Afghanistan will just heighten the indignity.
In watching the coverage, I was struck by the tone of passive
acquiescence. Not enough, in hours of listening, did I hear many express
anger. No one said, coldly but in deadly seriousness, "People are going to
die for this, a whole lot of people. " There was talk of tracking down bin
Laden and bringing him to justice. "Terrorism experts" spoke of months
of investigation to find who was responsible.
The Israelis, when hit, hit back. They hit back hard. Perhaps two-thirds of
the newscasters spoke of the attack over and over as a tragedy, as
though it had been an unusually bad storm -- unfortunate, but inevitable,
and now we must get on with our lives.
We haven't conceded that most of the Moslem world is our enemy, nor that we
are at war. We see each defeat and humiliation in isolation, as a unique
incident unrelated to anything else. The 241 Marines killed by the truck
bomb in Beirut, the extended humiliation of the hostages taken by Iran,
the war with Iraq, the bombing of the Cole, the destruction of the
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the devastation of the Starke, the
Saudi barracks, the dropping of airliner after airliner -- these we see as
anecdotes, like pileups of cars on a snowy road. They see these things as
war.
Do we face an enemy more intelligent than we are in some respects?
We think we are a superpower. Actually we are not, except in the
useless sense of having nuclear weapons. We could win an air war with
anyone, yes, or a naval war. Few Americans realize
how small our forces are today, how demoralized and weakened by social
experimentation. If we had to fight a ground war in terrain with cover, a
war in which we would take casualties, we could lose.
I have heard some grrr-woofwoofery about how we should invade
Afghanistan and teach those SOB's a lesson. Has anyone noticed where
Afghanistan is? How would we get there? Across Pakistan, a Moslem
country? Or through India? Do we suppose Iran would give us overflight
rights to bomb another Moslem country? Or will our supply lines go across
Russia through Turkmenistan? Do we imagine that we have the airlift or
sealift? What effect do we think bombing might have on Afghanistan, a
country that is essentially rubble to begin with?
We backed out of Somalia, a Moslem country, when a couple of GIs got
killed and dragged through the streets on TV. Afghans are not pansies.
They whipped the Russians. Some of our sensitive and socially-conscious troops
would curl up in balls.
To win against a more powerful enemy, one forces him to fight a kind
of war for which he isn't prepared. Iraq lost the Gulf War partly because it fought
exactly the kind of war in which American forces are unbeatable. Hussein
played to his weaknesses and our strengths. The Vietnamese did the
opposite. They fought a guerrilla war that didn't give us
anything to hit. They understood us. We didn't understand them.
The Moslem world is doing the same thing. Because their troops, or
terrorists as we call them, are not sponsored by a country, we don't know
who to hit. Note that Yasser Arafat, bin Laden, and the Taliban are all
denying any part in the destruction of New York. At best, we might, with
our creaky intelligence apparatus, find Laden and kill him. It's not worth
doing; Not only would he have defeated America as nobody ever has, but
he would then be a martyr. Face it; Some Arabs are smarter than we are.
We are militarily weak because we have done what we usually do; If
no enemy is immediately in sight, we cut our forces too far back, stop most
R&D, and focus on sensitivity training about homosexuals.
The only way we could save any dignity and respect in the world would be to
hit back so hard as to make teeth rattle around the world.
Don~
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