No Shortage Of Memory

*5/1/11 Update: the mastermind of 9/11/01 is DEAD. God Bless the US Navy SEALs who put paid to Osama bin Laden. Rot in Hawg Hell, Osama*

September 11, 2001, prior to 7am, Mountain Daylight Savings Time. I was sitting at home, enjoying a day off, sipping coffee and listening to the news.

I heard it as it happened, and was reported. I didn't need to see the images as they happened; hearing it come across the radio gave me a feeling -- a deathly chill -- that I believe listeners felt on the afternoon of December 7, 1941, as they sat riveted to their radios, and learned of Pearl Harbor.

Perhaps some folks hereabouts have forgotten that day, and what they were doing when they heard the awful news of September 11, 2001. I have not. Not the 2996 who were murdered. Not the joy expressed amongst Islamofascists across the Middle East at the news of those murdered. Not the words of horror, disbelief, denial and finally anger, as the facts became known.

Nor have I forgotten the words I wrote about it, a day later. I repeat the gist of them here, now.

I wasn't wrong in what I wrote then. I'm not wrong today. No pundit alive has changed my mind or opinion about September 11, 2001. Where I briefly worked earlier this year -- at a terrorism awareness museum -- hasn't changed my mind an iota about 9/11/01.

Sure, you can argue whatever point of view you want to about 9/11. That's what this country is about. But when you argue that we deserved 9/11/01 -- like the abysmally hate-filled Ward Churchills of the world do -- you are tuned out of my attention span. You are in my view, at best Neville Chamberlainesque, or worse, in unholy alliance with the enemy. Chamberlain was willing to sell out a valiant ally, to appease a German dictator to try to avoid war. Instead, Chamberlain's sellout of Czechoslovakia, and his appeasement of Adolph Hitler at Munich in September, 1938, guaranteed the onset of the most costly war in human history.

I don't need bleeding hearts on MSNBC or CNN to tell me who's responsible for 9/11: the sons of bitches who did it are. Some of the same odious persons who have tried, and continue to try, to replicate September 11, 2001, to this day, along with some 'lone wolves' here and there.

Some Americans choose to forget, and hide in the verbiage of appeasement and "blame America first". "Mommy make them stop" might work with a nightmare, but it doesn't work in the real world, against real boogey men, kiddies.

I will never join the appeasement crowd.

George W. Bush was not my first choice for president in 2000; but he was, and proved to be, a better choice than AlGore's fraudulent visions of vast climate and economic scams. And in the wake of September 11, 2001, President Bush stood tall enough for me, whatever his mistakes prior to, or since.

Make no mistake: the war by Islamofascism was declared on us well before 9/11/01. The failed attack on the WTC in 1993 should have been more than enough to wake up Americans. But it wasn't. It always seems to take a 'Pearl Harbor' moment to get our collective attention. And the love of "quick gratification" in a spoiled society, doesn't allow the attention to remain long-viewed by some. The war -- radical Islamofascism vs the rest of the world -- goes on. And will, as long as much of the world remains apathetic, blind, or intimidated, to and by the threat.

A couple paraphrased thoughts from a warrior-historian, T. R. Fehrenbach*, are appropriate to close this post:

1. "Any kind of war short of jihad was, is, and will be unpopular with the people. Because such wars are fought with legions, and Americans, even when they are proud of them, do not like their legions. They do not like to serve in them, nor even to allow them to be what they must. For legions have no ideological or spiritual home in the liberal society. The liberal society has no use or need for legions -- as its prophets have long proclaimed. Except that in this world are tigers".

2. "If free nations want a certain kind of world, they will have to fight for it, with courage, money, diplomacy -- and legions. It is time for free, decent societies to continue to control their military forces, but to quit demanding from them impossible acquiescence in the liberal view toward life. A "modern" infantry may ride sky vehicles into combat, fire and sense its weapons through instrumentation, employ devices of frightening lethality in the future -- but it must also be old-fashioned enough to be iron-hard, poised for instant obedience, and prepared to die in the mud. If liberal, decent societies cannot discipline themselves to do these things, they may have nothing to offer the world. They may not last long enough".

Fehrenbach concluded with this: Aristotle wrote, "Almost all things have been found out, but some have been forgotten".

Aristotle was right.

That's how I saw it ten years ago. That's how I see it today.

God bless the US Military, and those of our civilian leaders who are smart enough to see the broader picture in the war on terror. Or, as I referred to it on 9/12/01, the War of the Shadows. If or when we, as a society, lose the long view...we stand to lose what it is we believe our way of life, and our society, has to offer the world, if not that way of life entirely.

* from This Kind of War -- The Classic Korean War History, by T. R. Fehrenbach