Winds of War: Did the US Overreact to 9-11? Time Magazine Looks Backs From 2031

From The Gathering Storm

“Since the U.S. presence in the Middle East had wound down after 2008, it was no longer obvious why Islamist terrorists would expend their energies attacking American cities. That was why, by the 30th anniversary of 9/11, many younger Americans looked back on that event as a strange aberration.”

Before I respond to that quote from the latest Time magazine article and before you throw your mouse at your monitor, a little background is in order.

All my life I’ve been a futurist of some sort. So when my September issue of Time magazine arrived and I saw that a noted historian was going to look back on the ‘war on terror’ from 30 years out and speculate how the war turned out, I was pretty interested even though I knew Time magazine was a left wing leaning publication. So I started to read the article with some trepidation.

I was right. The article was written by a Niall Ferguson and according to Time magazine is one of the world's leading historians. Ferguson speculated on how future generations will judge the war on terrorism - and on what it will take for America to win it.

How much this noted historian speculated about the future affected his ignorance of the past.

His first mistake is declaring that the ‘war’ started on 9-11. That’s not true. At the very least it started when Osama bin Laden published his fatwa in Al Quds Al Arabi, a London-based newspaper, in August, 1996. But we know now that it started before that with the marines killed in their barracks in Beirut, the bombing of the Cole, and the first Twin Towers attack in ‘93. To say otherwise is to fall into the leftist trap that the terrorist attacks were the results of some crazed misguided Islamists. This is not a war on terror but a war on democracy.

And I must admit that’s one of the few things Ferguson got right in his piece.

“At first they called it the Global War on Terrorism. In time, historians re-branded it the Great War for Democracy…… Thirty years later, the Great War for Democracy has been won. And not many people in 2006 would have predicted the winner.”

I’ve said before that the 21st century will see the final struggle between democracy and tyranny and that by the end of the century their will be little of know totalitarian governments left in the world (outside of some small Marxist countries in Africa and South America). The simply will not be able to compete with the free democracies and economies.

“It was a new-style democratic war from the very outset because the enemy chose as its targets not masses of troops or military installations, as in traditional war, but U.S. civilians, ordinary people going about their business on planes, in tower blocks, in government offices. And it was democratic because the perpetrators took advantage of the very freedoms inherent in democracy to lay their murderous plans.”

The ‘new style war’ was an asynchronous war – a war the Jihadists proved successful against the more powerful democracies and “took advantage of the very freedoms inherent in democracy to lay their murderous plans”. Not to mention using our freedoms against us to wage the more insidious silent jihad with the tactics of intimidation, infiltration, and Disinformation to advance the goal of the Islamists which is shared by all Islamists - the institution of sharia law.

“It was democratic too in the sense that the U.S. was able to wage a war of retaliation with minimal coercion of its own citizens. There was no draft, no censorship of the press and--a first--no economic squeeze to pay for the war. On the contrary, Americans were told it was their patriotic duty to carry on consuming.”

Since war was declared by Congress, the US has never been put on a war footing. No sacrifices were asked for. No Executive Orders issued to remove our country from the foreign oil tit. No ‘Manhattan Project’ to jump-start an alternative energy program which could have happened if war was officially declared against the encouragement of sharia law here and Islamo-fascism abroad.

Ferguson goes on to speak of many things in his article, much of which is rehash of current and past events over the last several years. I will take issue with his speculation on the war and how it was to turn out.

“But the U.S. doggedly remained a republic, to the disappointment of a few hawkish commentators and the relief of everyone else. Elections happened as usual. When torture was used against suspected terrorists, for example, the press howled. When suspects were detained without charge, the courts intervened. As Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor put it, "A state of war isn't a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens." To many Americans, indeed, the whole point of the war was to preserve their country's democratic institutions.”

The Constitution is not a suicide pact. If we were truly on a war footing, these debates about security vs freedom would be mute. But by viewing the war as a criminal justice problem as opponents tried to do gave them the leverage to oppose any security program like the Patriot Act or NSA snooping program.

“Most significant, the war that began on Sept. 11, 2001, was democratic in a strategic sense, since the democratization of the greater Middle East became one of America's principal war aims. It was an aim inspired by the democratic-peace theory, which stated that democracies were less likely to go to war with one another than were other kinds of states and that therefore a world with more democracies would be a more peaceful world.”

Bush did not see both in the free democracies and the middle-East that democracy would be used as a tool to advance the Islamist agenda if all it did was vote the Islamists into power like Hamas and Hezbollah. Bush understood that it was a ideological war we were fighting but he did not understand that we were fighting this war on many fronts. The Islamists used democracy - their own and ours - to move forward with their ideological agenda. What Bush forgot was that Hitler was democratically elected by the German people and once he gained office, dismantled the protections of a true freedom protecting democracy.

“The right tactic to defeat it was not conventional warfare but tedious intelligence work--monitoring telephone calls, tracking financial transactions, shadowing suspects, infiltrating cells.”

It’s interesting that he should mention that since the liberal left opposed many of these tactics.

“For all those reasons, it was hardly surprising that, by the time of the fifth anniversary, many experts argued that the U.S. reaction to 9/11 had failed to eliminate the terrorist threat and instead had made the world a more dangerous place.”

No, it failed because we did not identify the real enemy. Terrorism is a method by which Islamists wish to come to power. It’s combined with the demographic and economic jihads to infiltrate and weaken the cultures they have targeted to absorb.

Now let’s get back to quote at the beginning of this post.

“As time passed, the once hated Great Satan was no longer everybody's favorite whipping boy. Since the U.S. presence in the Middle East had wound down after 2008, it was no longer obvious why Islamist terrorists would expend their energies attacking American cities. That was why, by the 30th anniversary of 9/11, many younger Americans looked back on that event as a strange aberration.”

What an unbelievable statement! Let’s see, we pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, abandon Israel to its fate, be held an oil hostage by Iran, and remove all presence from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, and we will no longer be the ‘world’s whipping boy’. Here you have the liberal left’s pipe dream of Utopia – or otherwise known as the George Soros Foreign Policy.

This dream world of the liberals does not include or understand that Islam is on the march and it will not stop at the Middle-East, or Africa or Europe until it reaches the US and makes the Law of Islam the law of the land. Ferguson goes on to actually contradict himself in this rosy world view.

“It was true, things had not turned out well for the U.S. after 9/11. The project to democratize the Middle East ended poorly. The U.S. lost its influence over the world's most oil-rich region. Terrorist networks thrived in Europe.”

Wait a minute. If all is peachy keen with the world and the West if it followed the scenario above – what is the need for terrorist networks in Europe? And why wouldn’t’ that be a threat to the US? If fact earlier in the piece, Ferguson said:

“It was one of the great ironies of the war on terrorism that just five years after 9/11, many counterterrorism experts were convinced that the most likely source of another big attack on the U.S. was not the axis of evil but conceivably America's closest ally, Britain.”

Ferguson closes with this.

“We tried to give the Muslim world a political upgrade," said U.S. President Jimmy McCain, son of the former Senator and a veteran of the Iraq war, on the 30th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. "I guess we failed. So instead we gave ourselves an economic upgrade. I guess we succeeded." The war that began on Sept. 11, 2001, is now over. Back in 2006 there were those who feared that the U.S. might lose that war. Today, 25 years later, we can see they were wrong. The American Century is alive--and kicking.”

And ignored the advancing threat like good little dhimmis.