28 April 2006
United 93
In the April 27, 2006, Wall Street Journal, David Beamer’s heartfelt essay about the heroic end to tragic flight United 93 owing in large part to his son displays the distortion of the causes of this terrorist event that led this country into the further tragedy of a war in Iraq. He uses the words “freedom” (4 times) and “liberty” (3 times) to describe American values that came under attack on September 11 by “an enemy who will stop at nothing to achieve world domination.” He, the general public, and the Wall Street Journal too uncritically accepted this simplistic characterization from a U.S. power structure that apparently, to be generous, found it too complicated to explain what the country was up against.
A real solution to the challenge of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism inconveniently demands new methods that were not in our top drawer on September 11. Iraq was the preferred enemy of Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon because that country had “better targets” than Afghanistan. Similarly, his military machine was not prepared to combat the kind of enemy that struck the U.S. in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. So, for want of an effective response, the American government took the kind of retaliatory action that it could portray as required by a challenge to our liberty, regardless of whether our freedom was actually threatened.
What was threatened was our security, our ability to use our wealth, power and leadership to protect our safety and “pursuit of happiness.” Our enemy did not seek to dominate us, or to dominate anyone else, for that matter. Our enemy is chaos, disorder in a world that that enemy believes we and our liberal democratic allies dominate. It’s easier to bomb a dictator out of power in a place like Iraq than to engage in a long term program of education and investment to build commitment among radical fundamentalists to common values with the West.
In the April 27, 2006, Wall Street Journal, David Beamer’s heartfelt essay about the heroic end to tragic flight United 93 owing in large part to his son displays the distortion of the causes of this terrorist event that led this country into the further tragedy of a war in Iraq. He uses the words “freedom” (4 times) and “liberty” (3 times) to describe American values that came under attack on September 11 by “an enemy who will stop at nothing to achieve world domination.” He, the general public, and the Wall Street Journal too uncritically accepted this simplistic characterization from a U.S. power structure that apparently, to be generous, found it too complicated to explain what the country was up against.
A real solution to the challenge of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism inconveniently demands new methods that were not in our top drawer on September 11. Iraq was the preferred enemy of Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon because that country had “better targets” than Afghanistan. Similarly, his military machine was not prepared to combat the kind of enemy that struck the U.S. in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. So, for want of an effective response, the American government took the kind of retaliatory action that it could portray as required by a challenge to our liberty, regardless of whether our freedom was actually threatened.
What was threatened was our security, our ability to use our wealth, power and leadership to protect our safety and “pursuit of happiness.” Our enemy did not seek to dominate us, or to dominate anyone else, for that matter. Our enemy is chaos, disorder in a world that that enemy believes we and our liberal democratic allies dominate. It’s easier to bomb a dictator out of power in a place like Iraq than to engage in a long term program of education and investment to build commitment among radical fundamentalists to common values with the West.
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