RUTHFULLY YOURS

I’m posing the question, because I consider both acts of belligerency expressions of larger conflicts than just Japan’s or al-Qaeda’s with America. I take Pearl Harbor to have been Oriental despotism’s fascist-tinged declaration of war on Occidental democracy, and regard 9/11 as theocratic Islam’s challenge to secular post-Christendom.

If this sounds needlessly apocalyptic, put it aside. We don’t need to describe 9/11 as the Middle Ages throwing down the gauntlet to modernity, or the 12th century ambushing the 21st, to compare the world 10 years after Japan’s Dec. 7, 1941 attack against the naval base at Pearl Harbor with the world 10 years after al-Qaeda’s Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Just putting the two side by side will do.

On the face of it, 1951 looked better for the democracies of the West than 2011. Sixty years ago the enemy that instigated the attack had been defeated, annihilated, and ground into the dust. Imperial Japan’s military regime had been toppled, its leaders tried, imprisoned or executed, their ideas discredited and discarded. Even more importantly, the defeated enemies had been resurrected and rehabilitated, or rather assisted to resurrect and rehabilitate themselves. By the end of the anniversary year, America’s $13-billion effort to rebuild Europe, the Marshall Plan, could be declared a success and allowed to expire. Nation-building worked 60 years ago — provided a nation wanted to be built.

In contrast, as the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the Islamist enemy, far from being annihilated or discredited, let alone ground into the dust, is alive and kicking. Some of its heads have been cut off, including one named Osama bin Laden that stuck out its hideous neck more than the others, but like the monster Hydra of Greek mythology, Islamism continues to grow new ones. Al-Qaeda-inspired terrorists managed to launch other urban attacks after 9/11 in London, Madrid, Moscow and Mumbai, even if on a smaller scale. The Taliban hasn’t only fought the Western coalition to a standstill in Afghanistan, but seems on the verge of taking the country over again. Nation-building, a hit in post-war Japan, Italy and (West) Germany, is a flop in Mesopotamia and the Hindu Kush.

As we reach the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, terrorists seem to have the upper hand. They make us practise defensive stripping at airports from Brussels to Seattle. Far from retreating, the Islamists are boldly developing nuclear capability in Iran, a country they own, while manoeuvring to take over countries that already have nuclear weapons, such as Pakistan, or strong military traditions, such as Turkey.

If this isn’t enough of a witch’s brew, add a dash of the unfathomable “Arab Spring” that may yet result in the replacement of nasty tyrants with even nastier ones who despise us in addition to despising their own people; then throw in a feeble democracy flopping about like a fish on dry land in Iraq, and that’s what the West has to show for 10 years of continuous warfare, thousands of casualties and a ballast of billions about to capsize the world’s economy.

With this track record, far from being able to export our institutions, our previously exported institutions are losing their grip. As the American commentator Clifford D. May has observed, the Islamists of ostensibly Westernized Turkey are “positioning Turkey as a contender for leadership of the Muslim world, making it both an ally and a rival of Arabs and Persians eager for the same role.”

Ten years of war after 9/11 has made us sponsors of a competition among would-be Caliphs. As impresarios of resurgent Islam, we’re doing a great job.

But then again, things looked grim in 1951 as well. Oriental despotism, bottled up in Japan, was towering like an evil genie over Korea and China. The year 1951 in which president Harry S. Truman declared the official end of the war with Germany, was also the year in which the forces of Kim Il Sung and Mao Zedong captured Seoul for the second time, until General Douglas MacArthur pushed them out again a few months later. (MacArthur might have nuked them, too, had president Truman not relieved him of his Far Eastern Command.) Hydra’s Fascist and Nazi heads were gone, but the monster had replaced them with equally revolting Communist heads. Fifth columns flourished. 1951 was the year Ethel and Julius Rosenberg received the death sentence for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

Tyrannies are strong starters. They often lead on the backstretch and fade only after the clubhouse turn. Democracies are strong finishers. As the anniversary of 9/11 approaches, that’s something to remember. Don’t tear up your tickets yet.

National Post