ninme

The sky was about this colour on 9/11.

James Lileks asked, if we’re not too tired of being asked, to remember where we were when we heard. People aren’t too tired to remember.

I was in bed, reading a trashy novel. Peter was up, doing something on the computer. Drexel terms didn’t start till late in September. We were going to Italy in a week to visit his grandfather and then on the flight back I was going to stay in London for my fall term studying there. His mother called (after it had all happened). She was saying something, then Peter looks at me and says “A plane hit the World Trade Center?” She says something else, and then he says, “A plane hit the Pentagon.” Frusterated, I wanted the silly woman to make up her mind, and said something like “They’re in two different cities. Which one?” Unlike everyone else in the world, the first thought in my head wasn’t “This is Terrorism!” followed by a deep and movie-preview-voiced “This is War!”.

We didn’t have a TV. We had a TV but it was hooked up to a DVD player. We couldn’t get a signal in that building and no way we were paying for cable. So we tried looking on the internet. We had just enough of a chance to see that something Big had happened, then the internet went kablooie. After a few minutes random people started mirroring the major news sites, but it was still hard to get ahold of anything. So I called home, in California, from Philadelphia, to find out what was going on in New York. No one was home, so I called my dad’s office. He’d just gotten in, which means it was about 11 on the East Coast already. He reported as much as he knew, plus some reports he’d heard about the anniversary of some Camp David accord being the point of it. Then I got ahold of mom, and she said there had to be ten thousand people dead, at least. They used to live in New York, incidentally.

Meanwhile, the internet still wasn’t working, and Rush was gone (he was on his way to a golf trip, I knew that, and I knew he’d been travelling, and I knew there were rumours about dozens of plans that had been grounded before they could do anything too). Going slightly crazy, I left Peter tackling the mirrored sites and I went downstairs to the bar across the street, which was full, because the entirety of downtown Philadelphia had been evacuated, basically. All anyone knew was that New York was smoking, DC was smoking, and we were equidistant between the two and there were still all sorts of planes out there unaccounted for. Some guy sitting next to me kept calling his wife who was on her way to meet him to check up on her every few minutes.

That Friday, a Russian Orthodox friend of mine came with me to the Cathedral for the prayer service. Afterwards, it started drizzling, and random people were sharing umbrellas with each other, in Philly. That weekend we went to Peter’s parents house in Delaware to watch TV. We cancelled the trip to Naples, and I went to London at the end of the month.

The comments to Lileks’ post start at 1:33, and it takes till 9:51 for someone to say that Bin Laden is a Bush Family Friend and Cohort and that he’s part of the PR team.

The BBC has up a 10 minute report from later in the day, attached to their On This Day report. I saw Fox News had up video from the day, but by the time I got around to it the link had disappeared. What I want to see is Rudy, but the shot I saw of Rudy wasn’t on the morning’s news feed, it was found later after the journalist and his cameraman got back to the studio and filed what they had and was played later. And I want to see the press briefings that Rummy did.

OC Register (this past Sunday) - Mark Steyn: No terrorism, just war?

It was a terrorist war in which terrorism was almost routine. But, in the six years since President Bush declared that America was in a “war on terror,” there has been in America no terrorism.

In theory, the administration ought to derive a political benefit from this: The president has “kept America safe.” But, in practice, the placidity of the domestic front diminishes the chosen rationale of the conflict: if a “war on terror” has no terror, who says there’s a war at all? That’s the argument of the left – that it’s all a racket cooked up by the Bushitlerburton fascists to impose on America a permanent national-security state in which, for dark sinister reasons of his own, Dick Cheney is free to monitor your out-of-state phone calls all day long.

Judging from the blithe expressions of commuters doing the shoeless shuffle through the security line at LAX and O’Hare, most Americans seem relatively content with a permanent national-security state. It’s a curious paradox: airports on permanent Orange Alert, and a citizenry on permanent … well, I’m not sure there’s a Homeland Security color code for “Gaily Insouciant,” but, if there is, it’s probably a bland limpid pastel of some kind. Of course, if tomorrow there’s a big smoking hole where the Empire State Building used to be, we’ll be back to: “The president should have known! This proves the failure of his policies over the last six years! We need another all-star commission filled with retired grandees!”

And that would be the relatively sane reaction. Have you seen that bumper sticker “9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB”? If you haven’t, go to a college town and cruise Main Street for a couple of minutes. It seems odd that a fascist regime that thinks nothing of killing thousands of people in a big landmark building in the center of the city hasn’t quietly offed some of these dissident professors – or at least the guy with the sticker-printing contract. Fearlessly, Robert Fisk of Britain’s Independent, the alleged dean of Middle East correspondents, has now crossed over to the truther side and written a piece headlined, “Even I Question The ‘Truth’ About 9/11.” According to a poll in May, 35 percent of Democrats believe that Bush knew about 9/11 in advance. Did Rumsfeld also know? Almost certainly. That’s why he went to his office as normal that today, because he knew in advance that the plane would slice through the Pentagon but come to a halt on the far side of the photocopier. That’s how well-planned it was, unlike Iraq.

He’s been doing a retrospective, republishing a lot of the stuff he wrote that week, some of which is reprinted from his book The Face of the Tiger, and from a variety of news publications, all of which will disappear from their links in a few days.

Steyn Online - PRIMAL

In my state, New Hampshire, the “Live Free Or Die” state, there were thousands of flags. Dawn Dupont of Pembroke stood out on the road holding her “Beep To Bomb Bin Laden” sign, and the overwhelming majority did. The students at Plymouth State College made a huge “Live Free Or Die Against Terrorism” banner and unfurled it in the state capital, Concord. A neighbour of mine put up the biggest flag in town and demanded a massive military response. “But she’s a Democrat,” I said to a friend. “And a lesbian.” “Ah, yes,” he replied, “but she belongs to the hawkish wing of the lesbian movement.”

There are a lot of them around. The New Statesman would be foolish to assume the warmongers are all GOP cowboys.

We had a lot of Serious Discussions at the bar across the lobby from the restaurant where my friend worked. The next day, did you know? They were running out of alcohol because the liquor stores were all closed, planes were all grounded and no one was making deliveries. The FedEx guys were stuck at the hotel. The bartender, another friend of mine, had a printout behind the bar with the make of car and some people she was supposed to be keeping an eye out for. They were looking for somebody. The conversation was pretty well centered on the happy concept of bombing the crap out of somebody, and why it hadn’t been done before, and I said something about “bleeding-heart liberals” and another friend of mine, who had joined me in being the most vocal of this little gathering, said “Yeah, and I used to be one of those ‘bleeding-heart liberals’!” I didn’t time how long it took for that feeling to wear off.

Steyn Online (from The Spectator, September 11, 2004) - Three years on

This one’s creepy, not only because how prescient it seems, but because it shows, really, how awful it’s been this whole time. The media makes it sound like “people” are getting “tired” of the war only since the latest Bush gaffe, but we’ve been dealing with this crap the whole. freaking. time.

Three years after September 11th, the Islamist death cult is the love whose name no-one dare speak. And, if you can’t even bring yourself to identify your enemy, are you likely to defeat him? Can you even know him? He seems to know us pretty well. He understands the pressures he can bring to bear on Spain, and the Phillipines, and France, too. He’s come to appreciate the self-imposed constraints under which his enemy fights – the legalisms, the political correctness, the deference to ineffectual multilateralism. He’s revolted by the infidels’ decadence but he has to admit it’s enormously helpful: the useful idiots of the pro-gay, pro-feminist left are far more idiotic and far more useful to him than they ever were to Stalin. He’s figured out that while pluralistic open democracy might be a debased system of government next to Sharia, it has its moments: he had no idea quite so many westerners so loathed their own governments and, if not their own, then certainly America’s. And he never thought that, even in America, while one party is at war, the other party is at war with the very idea that there is a war. And even the party committed to war presides over a lethargic unreformed bureaucracy large chunks of which are determined to obstruct it.

So, despite the loss of the Afghan training camps and Saddam and the Taliban and three-quarters of al-Qaeda’s leadership, it hasn’t been a bad three years: he has learned the limits of the west’s resolve, and all he has to do is put a bit of thought into exploiting it in the years ahead. A nuclear Iran will certainly help.

By contrast, what have we learned? According to the Associated Press, last Sunday, at the Bercy stadium in Paris, Madonna dedicated her performance of “Imagine” to what the AP reporter was still calling “the Russian hostage crisis”, even though by then the “crisis” was over, as were the lives of the hostages. Madonna “urged fans to think about what happened in Russia and Lennon’s lyrics”.

Okay:

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try…

Not what I would want to hear if my kid had just been shot dead by a terrorist… I mocked the singing of “Imagine” on some 9/11 all-star memorial gala in the fall of 2001, yet here it is again, irrelevant, dated, but indestructible as ever. Singing “Imagine” is a sure sign of a failure to imagine.

That’s really the heart of it: the failure of what Osama bin Laden saw as a soft pampered west to imagine that it can ever all come to an end. Three years ago, for the cover of our September 11th issue, Heath drew us a defiant Statue of Liberty, her torch held high above our headline: “The West Must Fight Back.” Nice idea, but it didn’t quite work out like that. 9/11 was not “the day that changed the world”, but instead the day that revealed how much the world had already changed. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, “the west”, for example, had lacked sufficient sense of common purpose to “fight back”.

It’s fashionable now to employ some false distinction between Afghanistan and Iraq – the good war and the Texas cowboy’s Halliburton land grab. But “the west” was never committed even to Afghanistan. A few months back, I had the honour of participating in the US Naval Academy’s annual Foreign Affairs Conference in Annapolis. After I’d made a few breezy generalizations about the pitiful performance of America’s so-called allies, an indignant French naval cadet stood up to insist that, au contraire, Paris had made a significant contribution to the war in Afghanistan. Why, it had dispatched the ultimate symbol of Gallic prestige, the nuclear (and, indeed, toxic) aircraft carrier the Charles de Gaulle.

It seemed cruel to point out that Afghanistan is a land-locked country, and that dispatching a stricken carrier with a few reconnaissance aircraft to the general vicinity of the Indian Ocean is not perhaps the most robust commitment to the war effort. It seemed crueler to point out that the Charles de Gaulle was dispatched in late December 2002, a month after the fall of Kabul. In other words, the French had waited till the war was over before making a contribution to it. That’s America’s post-modern “alliance”.

In the US, some observers thought it would be different once Europe got hit. On the day of the Madrid bombing, John Ellis, a Bush cousin and a shrewd commentator, declared confidently: “Every member-state of the EU understands that Madrid is Rome is Berlin is Amsterdam is Paris is London is New York.” All wrong. Within 72 hours of the atrocity, voters sent a tough message to the Islamists: “We apologize for catching your eye.” Whether or not Madrid is Rome, Berlin, etc, etc, it certainly isn’t New York. At least in the two-and-a-half years between 9/11 and 3/11, there was always the possibility of Europe stiffening itself. Now America lives with the certainty that it won’t, and can’t, until it’s too late.

This war will go on for some decades, and by the end of it Madrid will be Rome will be Berlin will be Amsterdam will be Paris, but none of them will be as we now know them. As I’ve said here before, by 2030 Europe will be Eurabia – at least semi-Islamified… Imagine France with a 20% Muslim bloc and then consider the likelihood of French forces fighting alongside the US ever again.

In her lame apologia for last week’s kiddie-killers, The Independent’s Isabel Hilton rhapsodized about “asymmetrical warfare” – how else could the poor wee insurgents/activists/whatever fight back against overwhelmingly superior force? But these days who’s really “superior”? An old-fashioned European army – Belgium’s, say - is incapable of projecting itself to Saudi Arabia; but a terrorist group in Saudi Arabia, through routine innovations like e-mail, cell phones and automated bank machines, can easily project itself to Belgium. What did 9/11 cost its perpetrators? Flight lessons would be below $5,000 depending on how impatient the hijackers were (as Zac Massaoui told his instructors, he didn’t need to learn how to land), boxcutters cost a couple of bucks, add in a few rental cars and motels, and that’s it. For around $150,000, 19 not especially talented terrorists killed more than 3,000 people and caused immediate economic damage of $ 27 billion, with the final tab yet to be calculated.

That’s what I call asymmetrical.

The Western Standard - The Shotgun Blog - Why Canada has to finish the job in Afghanistan

Remember, it was the Liberals who sent our military to Afghanistan in the first place and it was the Liberals who made a long-term commitment to the U.S., the U.N. and NATO. Yet, day after day we hear Jack Layton, Stephane Dion and Gilles Duceppe talk about bringing the soldiers home. As a result, many Canadians have the impression that we shouldn’t be there, that it is simply a matter of choice for us to leave. But, what about our word as a country? Does it not mean anything anymore — that as soon as things get tough or uncomfortable, we cut and run?

Let’s review how we got involved in Afghanistan in the first place. Here is a time line in brief:

• September 11, 2001 — Terrorists who trained in Afghanistan attacked the U.S.
• October 7, 2001 — Prime Minister Jean Chretien orders the Canadian military to help the U.S. launch attacks in Afghanistan to get rid of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
• October 8, 2001 — Defence Minister Art Eggleton pledges 2000 troops in the U.S. led campaign.
• January 14, 2002 — Canadian soldiers arrive in Kabul, Afghanistan.
• January 25, 2002 — After the fall of the Taliban, Canada re-establishes diplomatic ties with Kabul.
• February 12, 2003 — Defence Minister John McCallum announces Canada part of UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
• February 9, 2004 — Canada takes command of NATO in Kabul.
• June 29, 2005 — Canadian soldiers begin deploying to Kandahar.
• July 29, 2005 — Prime Minister Paul Martin says Kandahar mission right thing to do.
• January 23, 2006 — Conservatives form minority government who support completing the commitment already made by the former Liberal government.
• February 24, 2006 — Canadian troops start takeover from Americans on the front lines of Kandahar province — previously agreed to by the Liberal caucus.

Now, over and above the fact that it was the Liberals under both Jean Chretien and Paul Martin who agreed to go to Afghanistan in the first place, Canada is a signatory to the Afghanistan Compact, an agreement that was signed in January 2006 with the United Nations and 60 nations from all parts of the world — including Canada — and was for five years to the end of 2011.

Therefore, since that compact was signed by Canada towards the end of the last federal election, it means that the Liberal government of Paul Martin was in complete agreement to the hoped for outcomes. Which is why Canada cannot simply cut and run and why the Canadian people must be told, loud and clear, why we must finish the job in Afghanistan. Because we gave our word that we would do so — word that came from both Liberal and Conservative politicians and diplomats.

NRO - Fight Now, Love Later. By Mark Steyn

What would a 2001 USO show look like? There was a report that Bob Hope is eager to stage a special benefit. Bob is 98, just back from the hospital and recuperating from pneumonia, but he may be the only guy in Hollywood who’s not uncomfortable with uncomplicated flag-waving.

See? That’s from the NRO 911 Archive, “Collected writings from the early aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001.”

In the intro to “Primal”, Steyn says:

I don’t know quite when the sensibility of that immediate post-9/11 era slipped from the present into history…

It’s when the Democrats started putting a bunch of Union contracts into the Homeland Security bill. And people reacted to that, including (for once) the Republicans. And then the politics started. The country was never “united” (Michael Moore, “Little Eichmanns”, Susan Sontag, etc etc), but after that the Democrats stopped singing God Bless America. The guy tending bar at the joint I went to to watch Bush’s address to the Joint Sessions, watching the applause and standing ovations, said “Somebody’s gonna get reelected”. But everyone saw the look on Hillary Clinton’s face. Which, interestingly, the TV cameras seemed to dwell on. Perhaps the cameraman was thinking what she was thinking. But the country was never “united”. Just everyone else.

Next year this’ll be a Thursday. It’ll be the last throws of a presidential election. If Rudy isn’t allowed to “trade on 9/11” now, he won’t be allowed to then, even though that’s what this is all about, and “trading on 9/11″ is exactly all anyone else does. So I figure this is the last year this is a big anniversary. And it’s not much of one anyway, as it is.