thedrifter
09-13-04, 07:13 AM
09-09-2004
From the Editor:
The Correct Lesson from Two Milestones
By Ed Offley
We cross two grim milestones in the war against Islamofascist terrorism this week. But a closer look shows that giving a superficial glance to those milestones will obscure a different situation altogether.
First, the news media dutifully touted the fact that the 1,000th American soldier had been killed in Iraq, giving anti-administration commentators yet another chance to raise the false comparison between Iraq and Vietnam. As two reporters for The Chicago Tribune intoned this morning, “The number of American troops killed in Iraq has hit the 1,000 mark, a grim milestone that analysts say is likely to raise new questions about the U.S. involvement there during the presidential campaign.”
Second, the third anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks will come on Saturday.
Both events, of course, are ultimately abstract and meaningless without the proper context. Or, should I say, a meaningful context.
Let’s look at Iraq first. The twin insurgencies of disaffected Ba’ath Party Sunnis and Iranian-controlled Shiites have indeed proven more difficult to dislodge than the U.S. military originally hoped. Fighting irregulars who spurn any notion of civilized warfare while adhering to those same precepts makes the mission of our soldiers and Marines that much more difficult (al Qaeda isn’t agonizing over the cold-blooded murders it has committed, much less the casual abuse of its detainees).
Unlike Vietnam, we will not destroy Fallujah in order to save it, even though the policy means that a substantially larger number of young American troops will have perished at the hands of roadside IEDs and ambushes than if the Marines last spring had been given the green light to sack the city in house-to-house fighting. Of course, the same blame-America-first critics who bemoan the rising U.S. casualty lists would be the first to angrily condemn Central Command leaders had they opted last spring – or decide later this year – to attack head-on the insurgents in Fallujah and other places.
The 9/11 anniversary also seems to present several clear messages: To the still-grieving survivors, the ninth day of this month will always evoke the horror and sadness and pain of that terrible morning. To those who support the current administration’s policies against virulent Islamic extremists, 9/11 will forever mark the date that our decade-long holiday from world events came to an end. And critics of the ongoing war against Islamofascist terror will shed crocodile tears about the precious moments that we all sang “God Bless America” together before the neo-cons hijacked the administration into launching its “reckless” war against the president’s father’s would-be assassin.
What I suddenly realized in looking at these two milestones is how the context being given them in many places is so shallow and incomplete.
Iraq remains a hard, dangerous and uphill mission, but nowhere in even the starkest news accounts do I see the probability or even likelihood of defeat for the United States, its allies and the emerging secular Iraqi government. In a little-reported conference at the conservative American Enterprise Institute this week, a broad spectrum of experts predicted that Iraq – fueled by the jihadist terrorists – may yet slide into a civil war involving the Shiites and Sunnis. But most predicted that the Iraqi government and U.S.-led military forces will ultimately win that fight.
Meanwhile, the jihadists in Iraq – like their evil counterparts in Chechnya, Afghanistan and Europe – are busily assassinating school children, kidnapping unarmed women and going after other soft targets because they are unable to stand up against the military or civil security forces mobilized against them. While U.S. homeland security officials remain on alert against a repeat of the 9/11 attacks on the United States itself, it is clear that security steps taken over the past three years have made it much more difficult for the terrorists to infiltrate and organize strikes here at home.
And there are – finally – signs of a backlash against the Islamofascists within Islam itself. One key example came from Abdulrahman al-Rashed, the respected journalist who is general manager of Al-Arabiya television, who this week named the un-namable in a London newspaper, Asharq Al-Awsat, following the bloody massacre of hundreds of Russian children by Chechen and al Qaeda terrorists: “Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture,” he wrote.
Al-Rashed wrote under the type of headline that has been sadly missing in the Arab news media since 9/11: “The Painful Truth: All the World Terrorists Are Muslims!” He added, “Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools and residential buildings around the world for the past 10 years have been Muslims.” It appears that the Muslim world’s elites are coming out of denial, at long last. (For additional examples of this kind of commentary from the Arab news media, see the Middle East Media Research Institute.)
So what are we to make of these milestones? For the vast majority of us who do not have loved ones serving on dangerous ground in Iraq or Afghanistan, this is a good time to pause and reflect on the losses that so many families have suffered. So too, we ought not downplay the remembrance of 9/11 to the point where we ignore the immeasurable grief of that day.
But it is critically important to look beyond those calendar-defined and media-driven artifices and fix our attention on what is really important. Writing in USA Today this morning, one U.S. government official said it best:
“It is possible to bring this insidious and ubiquitous enemy to its knees and to conquer the most virulent and destructive terrorist organizations. But we must pay a price in terms of vigilance and loss of mobility that will be significant and sustained. It will be a long and difficult struggle. There will be casualties and burdens, and the patience of the American people – not our strongest characteristic – will constantly be tested. But if we falter, we are destined to experience more of what we saw and suffered on Sept. 11.”
Solicitor General Theodore Olson writes with unshakeable moral authority because to him, 9/11 was more than a national catastrophe that occurred on his watch. His wife, Barbara, perished aboard American Airlines Flight 77 when it struck the Pentagon.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2004 Ed Offley.
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=FTE.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=51&rnd=828.050422228795
Ellie
From the Editor:
The Correct Lesson from Two Milestones
By Ed Offley
We cross two grim milestones in the war against Islamofascist terrorism this week. But a closer look shows that giving a superficial glance to those milestones will obscure a different situation altogether.
First, the news media dutifully touted the fact that the 1,000th American soldier had been killed in Iraq, giving anti-administration commentators yet another chance to raise the false comparison between Iraq and Vietnam. As two reporters for The Chicago Tribune intoned this morning, “The number of American troops killed in Iraq has hit the 1,000 mark, a grim milestone that analysts say is likely to raise new questions about the U.S. involvement there during the presidential campaign.”
Second, the third anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks will come on Saturday.
Both events, of course, are ultimately abstract and meaningless without the proper context. Or, should I say, a meaningful context.
Let’s look at Iraq first. The twin insurgencies of disaffected Ba’ath Party Sunnis and Iranian-controlled Shiites have indeed proven more difficult to dislodge than the U.S. military originally hoped. Fighting irregulars who spurn any notion of civilized warfare while adhering to those same precepts makes the mission of our soldiers and Marines that much more difficult (al Qaeda isn’t agonizing over the cold-blooded murders it has committed, much less the casual abuse of its detainees).
Unlike Vietnam, we will not destroy Fallujah in order to save it, even though the policy means that a substantially larger number of young American troops will have perished at the hands of roadside IEDs and ambushes than if the Marines last spring had been given the green light to sack the city in house-to-house fighting. Of course, the same blame-America-first critics who bemoan the rising U.S. casualty lists would be the first to angrily condemn Central Command leaders had they opted last spring – or decide later this year – to attack head-on the insurgents in Fallujah and other places.
The 9/11 anniversary also seems to present several clear messages: To the still-grieving survivors, the ninth day of this month will always evoke the horror and sadness and pain of that terrible morning. To those who support the current administration’s policies against virulent Islamic extremists, 9/11 will forever mark the date that our decade-long holiday from world events came to an end. And critics of the ongoing war against Islamofascist terror will shed crocodile tears about the precious moments that we all sang “God Bless America” together before the neo-cons hijacked the administration into launching its “reckless” war against the president’s father’s would-be assassin.
What I suddenly realized in looking at these two milestones is how the context being given them in many places is so shallow and incomplete.
Iraq remains a hard, dangerous and uphill mission, but nowhere in even the starkest news accounts do I see the probability or even likelihood of defeat for the United States, its allies and the emerging secular Iraqi government. In a little-reported conference at the conservative American Enterprise Institute this week, a broad spectrum of experts predicted that Iraq – fueled by the jihadist terrorists – may yet slide into a civil war involving the Shiites and Sunnis. But most predicted that the Iraqi government and U.S.-led military forces will ultimately win that fight.
Meanwhile, the jihadists in Iraq – like their evil counterparts in Chechnya, Afghanistan and Europe – are busily assassinating school children, kidnapping unarmed women and going after other soft targets because they are unable to stand up against the military or civil security forces mobilized against them. While U.S. homeland security officials remain on alert against a repeat of the 9/11 attacks on the United States itself, it is clear that security steps taken over the past three years have made it much more difficult for the terrorists to infiltrate and organize strikes here at home.
And there are – finally – signs of a backlash against the Islamofascists within Islam itself. One key example came from Abdulrahman al-Rashed, the respected journalist who is general manager of Al-Arabiya television, who this week named the un-namable in a London newspaper, Asharq Al-Awsat, following the bloody massacre of hundreds of Russian children by Chechen and al Qaeda terrorists: “Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture,” he wrote.
Al-Rashed wrote under the type of headline that has been sadly missing in the Arab news media since 9/11: “The Painful Truth: All the World Terrorists Are Muslims!” He added, “Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools and residential buildings around the world for the past 10 years have been Muslims.” It appears that the Muslim world’s elites are coming out of denial, at long last. (For additional examples of this kind of commentary from the Arab news media, see the Middle East Media Research Institute.)
So what are we to make of these milestones? For the vast majority of us who do not have loved ones serving on dangerous ground in Iraq or Afghanistan, this is a good time to pause and reflect on the losses that so many families have suffered. So too, we ought not downplay the remembrance of 9/11 to the point where we ignore the immeasurable grief of that day.
But it is critically important to look beyond those calendar-defined and media-driven artifices and fix our attention on what is really important. Writing in USA Today this morning, one U.S. government official said it best:
“It is possible to bring this insidious and ubiquitous enemy to its knees and to conquer the most virulent and destructive terrorist organizations. But we must pay a price in terms of vigilance and loss of mobility that will be significant and sustained. It will be a long and difficult struggle. There will be casualties and burdens, and the patience of the American people – not our strongest characteristic – will constantly be tested. But if we falter, we are destined to experience more of what we saw and suffered on Sept. 11.”
Solicitor General Theodore Olson writes with unshakeable moral authority because to him, 9/11 was more than a national catastrophe that occurred on his watch. His wife, Barbara, perished aboard American Airlines Flight 77 when it struck the Pentagon.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2004 Ed Offley.
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=FTE.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=51&rnd=828.050422228795
Ellie