9/11 multiples

In this essay, Victor Davis Hanson is, as so often, eloquent and exactly on the mark (albeit with at least a couple of targets that are only loosely related). I commend it to you in its entirety. But I was particularly struck by these two paragraphs near the end:

So the great disconnect in this present war continues, one that tests whether a sophisticated affluent West that eschews violence and nobly professes its wish to evolve beyond war, capital punishment, and unilateral preemption can defeat an ideology that is openly reactionary and seeks to return to the primordial world of the 8th century when beheading, limb-lopping, sharia law, and half the population in burqas were normal.

This is now a boring topic since 9/11 — our postmodern refinement and their premodern savagery. One final thought though. I used to hear people say, "It will take another 9/11" to come to our senses about our real peril. Now in several gloomy conversations I hear instead, "It will take three or four 9/11s to ..."

I'm not quite sure whether Professor Hanson agrees, but I'm genuinely sad to find myself in growing agreement with those who say that it will likely take "three or four 9/11s to" re-awaken America and the world's genuine, Western-inspired democracies to our peril.

I could not help but be reminded during the late President Ford's funeral ceremonies of how — despite his administration's best efforts in late 1974 and early 1975 — a newly radicalized opposition Congress cavalierly and eagerly broke our solemn promises to our South Vietnamese ally. Our South Vietnamese ally then was certainly a troubled land still, notwithstanding years of our protection, but it was one that had indeed begun to stand on its own feet and likely would have continued to do so — if only the Ford Administration had been permitted by Congress to continue with the financial and military aid we initially provided after our ground troops departed.

Our new Congress seems similarly foolhardy.  And as in Southeast Asia in the mid-1970s, the late-2000s may see hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of innocents dislocated, imprisoned, wounded, and/or killed, in the Middle East and South Asia.

We, of course, won't be doing the slaughtering ourselves. But a critical "but-for" link in the causal chain of those disasters will be closely tied to the fact that something approaching a majority of voting Americans either lack historical perspective, share a ridiculously short attention-span, or else have been successfully misled and deceived by "useful fools" who do fit those descriptions.

I hope those hundreds of thousands or millions won't be Americans. But I do indeed fear that the "two or three 9/11s" of which Professor Davis wrote may be combined into one much, much uglier episode — one in which the number of casualties on American soil will be a multiple of the 3000 lost on 9/11/01, and not necessarily or even likely with a multiplier as low as two or three.

"Remember back when," it will be asked then, "we thought that 3000 military deaths in Iraq was outrageous? Oh, would that we could have limited our latest death tolls to that!"

"Yes," will come the reply, "and remember how innocent and stupid we were when 'global warming' became the signature issue in the 2008 presidential campaigns? What were we thinking? Why ever did we think we could end the war — one we were already in before 9/11, even though almost none of us recognized it before 9/11 — simply by pulling up and going home?"