Fourteen Years On :: SteynOnline:
On Thursday I made my weekly appearance on The Hugh Hewitt Show.
We'll save some of the other subjects we discussed for a little later, but toward the end of our conversation (which you can find here, somewhat unreliably transcribed), Hugh asked me about today's anniversary:
HUGH HEWITT: Now speaking of blown sky high – "9/11" tomorrow. I asked Jeb Bush about this in the first hour. A
nd the question was, fourteen years later, the first seven years of that were run by your brother and then the second seven years were run by President Obama.
Are we safer today than we were on 9/12, 2001.
What do you Mark Steyn – Jeb Bush's answer is posted over at HughHewitt.com.
MARK STEYN: I think the problem is that we defined what we were up against in the fall of 2001, 2002 too narrowly - and I think you can see that actually at the time of the first anniversary in 2002. We are in an ideological struggle...
And we've seen that that ideology is very seductive to people who hold the passports of Western nations.
We are a hole, we are a vacuum - and something fills the vacuum, which is what we see in Europe and to a lesser extent over here.
And you can't fight this war even with the most brilliant military in the world because it's as I said in America Alone all those years ago - it's not my line, it's from Basil Liddell Hart, the great military strategist – it's not about blowing up their tanks and it's not about shooting their planes out of the sky – and nobody can beat Western militaries for doing that - but
if you don't understand that you're up against this ideology and you don't target that ideology, then you can never win.
And that's why I find this anniversary about as dispiriting as any of the fourteen since that Tuesday morning all those years ago.
I don't know why I said that this ideological faintheartedness was evident even at the time of the first anniversary in 2002.
So, after the show, I turned to The Face of the Tiger, my account of the first year of the new war. Back then 9/11 was "the day everything changed".
With hindsight, very little changed, with the exception of Muslim immigration, which accelerated.
So, as I said to Hugh, I find these anniversaries more dispiriting with each passing year.
Here's what I had to say on September 11th 2002, all of which applies to 2015, only more so:
...I believe western culture – rule of law, universal suffrage, etc – is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria.
Follow the traffic.
I
support immigration, but with assimilation.
Without it, like a Hindu widow, the west is slowly climbing on the funeral pyre of its lost empires. You see it in European foreign policy already: they're scared of their mysterious, swelling, unstoppable Muslim populations...
The Islamists are militarily weak but ideologically secure.
A year on, the west is just the opposite.
There's more than one way to lose a war.
