[Note: I’m keeping this post at the top all day, so even if you’ve read it, there might be new stuff if you scroll down]
OK, perhaps the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Day of Infamy™ deserves more than a snarky hit piece on nutty 911 conspiracy theorists.
Sixty five years after Pearl Harbor, it feels now like ancient history, despite the fact that we still have troops in Japan and Germany. I wonder how many people understand the implications of this date in history, or are even aware that it is a date in history? Many who have personal recollections of the event (my parents’ and grandparents generation) are passing, or passed, from the scene.
I was at the Arizona memorial a few weeks ago, my first visit. Before we got on the boats to go out to the sunken tomb, we were given some reminiscences by a man who was there, and helped tend to the wounded. There were children in the audience who may remember hearing his first-hand account. But for how much longer will he be telling his story? How long before the last person for whom the events of that day are a living memory will be gone?
To provide some perspective, Pearl Harbor is, to me, the way that children born in, say, 2015 will view 911. Something that their parents might tell them about, particularly if they fought in the subsequent battles of Afghanistan and Iraq (and the ones sadly to come). Of course, there will be many fewer parents telling children about that experience than did so for the second world war, simply by dint of the magnitude of the scope of the effort. I understand the significance of those events that occurred a decade and a half before my birth, because I’ve always had an interest in such things, but will they understand what happened on that long-ago September morning, when terror struck from a cloudless sky? Sadly, I fear not, because I fear that only five years later we’ve forgotten, or never learned. Certainly, there is little in the Baker report that makes me believe that we have.
Five years after Pearl Harbor, when my fictional account of the 127 Conspiracy took place, we’d utterly defeated both imperial Japan and the Nazis, and were dealing with the quagmire in Europe (the Marshall Plan that got western Germany back on its feet was just being conceived–it wouldn’t be implemented until the next year).
It’s been over five years since that tragically beautiful September day when we suddenly, and finally realized that we were at war with the next brutal totalitarian movement, after fooling ourselves that we were done with them after the Cold War. It turned out on September 11 that it wasn’t quite the End of History, after all. It took us less time than that to wipe out the totalitarians that attacked us in Hawaii, and made common cause with the Nazi totalitarians in Europe. Defeating the surviving totalitarian ideology from the conflict, Soviet Communism, took almost another half century. How long will we be fighting this new threat to the values of the Enlightenment?
If the Bakers have their way, probably far too long. There seems a desire to return to the “realist” dreamworld of the nineties, when we imagined that the age of totalitarianism was over, and that we could “manage” brutal dictators with shuttle diplomacy. Unfortunately, one of the big mistakes that the president made after 911 was to fail to properly and consistently mobilize the American people.
After Pearl Harbor, the nation recognized that we were in an existential war. The totalitarian and ideological threat of this new war is less obvious, and has been obscured by talk of war against “terrorists.” Franklin Roosevelt didn’t declare on the evening of December 7th that we were at war with torpedo bombers. He named the enemy. The president seems to continue to waver on this issue, occasionally talking about Islamofascists and the like, but still inviting people from CAIR to the White House and talking about the “religion of peace.” Rather than telling us the nature of the enemy, and calling for sacrifices that would be needed to win this new ideological struggle, he allowed and even encouraged the federal government to bloat, took away our nail clippers and shampoo, and told us to go shopping.
We are not at war with Islam, per se, but the people we are at war with are Islamists, and it does no good to ever pretend otherwise, and it is senseless to think that regimes run by them (e.g., Iran) or who cynically use them as pawns against us and our vital ally Israel (e.g., Syria) can be negotiated with. What is “realistic” about the fantasy that Syria will be satisfied with the Golan? How satisfied was Adolf Hitler with the Sudentenland? Rewarding Syria’s warlike behavior is not the way to get less of it.
Here is the real “reality.” We are at war with these countries, like it or not. They supply the troops and the weaponry that are killing our troops in Iraq, and who fire rockets (and missiles) into Haifa. In the case of Iran, in kidnaping our embassy personnel, they committed an act of war against us over a quarter of a century ago, for which there have never been any consequences against them. This was the beginning of the string of acts of political pusillanimity and weakness–followed by the Beirut Marine barracks, through the first WTC attack, and Somalia, and Khobar towers, and the Cole, that showed us to be paper tigers, encouraged the Islamists and ultimately resulted in drive-through skyscrapers. We’ve been at war with them since the Carter administration, and who knows how long the war will go on? Afghanistan was one battle in that war. Iraq is another. Where the next ones will be is not clear, but I suspect that they’re on the borders of Mesopotamia.
It’s of course much easier, and more convenient to pretend that we’re at not at war. Harder to get people to the mall when we’re at war, don’t you know? But this fantasy will only make greater the final reckoning. Right now, they certainly understand that they’re at war with us. What’s more, they think they’re winning. The only effective “negotiations” with the enemy will happen when the bombs are falling on them. Or at least, when they’re hurting in some way, and feel truly threatened. Short of that, it’s a repeat of the appeasement of the thirties–in Europe, in Manchuria, in China–that ultimately resulted in the sudden sinking of battleships in a tropical paradise on a quiet Sunday morning.
