Another 9/11 Anniversary, and We Have Still Learned Nothing Willful ignorance about our enemies. John Steinreich
https://www.frontpagemag.com/another-9-11-anniversary-and-we-have-still-learned-nothing/
In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks which turned the World Trade Center into a hellscape, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, where the Taliban government had protected the 9/11 mastermind, Saudi cleric Osama Bin Laden. Two years later, we invaded Iraq at least partly on the premise that Saddam Hussein was connected to Bin Laden.
Saddam was deposed and captured quickly enough, being executed in 2006. Bin Laden survived in hiding until Navy SEALs killed him in May 2011. In December of that year, the U.S. withdrew from Iraq. The U.S. military stayed in Afghanistan until a debacle of a withdrawal in August 2021. As of this writing 30 detainees are still in Guantanamo Bay on 9/11-related charges.
The Watson Institute reported that the Afghanistan war took 70,000 civilian lives and that between 186,000 and 316,000 civilians were killed in Iraq. Over 7,000 Americans died in these two conflicts. Harvard University estimates that the American taxpayer paid between $4 and $6 trillion for our Afghanistan and Iraq ventures. With such an astronomical price in blood and treasure for 9/11 and its aftermath, we need to ask some questions as we reach another anniversary of that evil day.
Do we truly understand why 9/11 happened?
Have we assessed our response to determine if it has been effective?
Did the pain of 9/11 cause us to increase our determination to cherish and protect our civilization all the more from hostile enemies?
Forgive my cynicism, but the answer to these questions is no, no, and no.
Retrieved from Bin Laden’s Islamabad compound after the SEALs killed him was an undated letter, likely composed sometime during the Obama administration, in which Bin Laden explained his rationale for attacking America:
As for us, jihad against the tyrants and the aggressors is a form of great worship in our religion. It is more precious to us than our fathers and sons. Thus, our jihad against you is worship, and your killing us is a testimony. Thanks to God, Almighty, we have been waging jihad for 30 years, against the Russians and then against you…Continue the war if you will.
The zealot’s acolytes engaged in an act of war against those whom they considered to be anti-Islamic tyrants and aggressors. A brief exegesis of the Islamic scriptures uncovers doctrinal support for jihad against unbelievers. It is a short theological jump from Qur’an 9:5 which says, “Kill the unbelievers wherever you find them,” to the commission of heinous acts of violence. When one’s highest prophet teaches, “I have been made victorious through terror” (Hadith of Sahih Al-Bulkhari 56:186), it is no wonder that a disciple will take whatever measures he can to drive fear into the infidel’s heart.
But in the two-plus decades since 9/11, the American powers-that-be have made no coherent effort to acknowledge this summation. Instead, the elite class has continued to deny the religio-political reasons for Islamic violence. Almost immediately after 9/11, President Bush told Congress that Islam is a religion of peace. Had he ever studied Islamic doctrine or history before issuing such a definitive statement? The media grabbed and repeated the “religion of peace” mantra endlessly. They embraced every opportunity to slander concerned Americans as Islamophobes for merely suggesting a connection between Islam and terrorism. How can we adequately protect ourselves from an enemy whose worldview we refuse to acknowledge?
Furthermore, Bush 43 declared war on “terror” and President Obama continued that foreign policy. But “terror” is a psychological tactic—inanimate, incorporeal, and synaptic. Had either former president ever considered how a nation-state can make war against a psychological phenomenon and not against a flesh-and-blood enemy?
Long ago the Chinese military genius Sun Tzu proffered this wisdom: “Know thyself, know thine enemy.” The ancient master articulated concisely that we would need to identify clearly who our actual human enemies are and what influences their actions in order to achieve real victory. This is something that the West generally and the U.S. government particularly have been woeful at doing. We have pretended that a disembodied idea (“terror”) is the enemy. Our leadership has excused the behavior of Bin Laden and men like him as unrepresentative of “true Islam” and pursued their prosecution as mere criminals. But the sheer volume of global Islamic terrorism since 2001 proves that our war on “terror” has done little to defeat that phenomenon.
Our failure stems from the reality that since 9/11 we have never fully named and therefore never really known our enemy. Even when Muslims base their actions on the example of their prophet to serve their deity, we are too unwilling to accept that Islam is the ideological fount of their conduct. Conversely, our enemies in the Islamic world exploit our willful ignorance and advance their plans for global domination.
The U.S. did have a short reprieve from its misadventures and kowtowing to Islamic radicalism when Donald Trump was president. He was a voice crying in the wilderness, exhibiting unique courage by going to Saudi Arabia in 2017 and applauding “the Gulf Cooperation Council for blocking funders from using their countries as a financial base for terror, and designating Hezbollah as a terrorist organization last year. Saudi Arabia also joined us this week in placing sanctions on one of the most senior leaders of Hezbollah.” Although his remarks referred to terror in the general sense, Trump stated unequivocally that “there is still much work to do”:
That means honestly confronting the crisis of Islamist extremism and the Islamist terror groups it inspires. And it means standing together against the murder of innocent Muslims, the oppression of women, the persecution of Jews, and the slaughter of Christians.
Unfortunately, with Trump’s departure from office our government re-established a posture of accommodation and willful blindness vis-a-vis Islam. Furthermore, something insidious in the American psyche was exposed in the wake of 9/11: a profound disdain for our own history and religious tradition. The cultural decay that we are currently experiencing is the result of our progressive jettisoning of the Christian foundation of our civilization. Sun Tzu would diagnose us as no longer knowing ourselves.
We in the West have engaged in preposterous levels of self-loathing while concurrently gaslighting our own populace with lies about what Islam is and what its fundamentalist adherents practice. Our historical Christian traditions have left the imprint of the virtue of grace on us, but because we have become disenchanted with our history due to our obsession with misplaced grief over our ancestors’ sins, we have tossed certain other biblical values—prudence, truth, courage, and wisdom—into the trash, thereby making our graciousness a point of weakness that our enemies can exploit.
We have become so accommodating that we have been willing to elect Muslims—including ones with open allegiance to foreign nations—to high office very quickly after jihad visited our shores. This points to a state of play in which we have chosen kumbaya pluralism and hipster relativism over national security and cultural preservation, turning a blind eye to the real threat emanating from a 1400-year-old religious ideology that has been at war with the world almost from its inception. The United States is a religiously tolerant nation but we have begun electing officials whose religious tradition stands in contradiction to our Protestant Christian foundations. The United States has prided itself on being a place where justice is pre-eminent, yet we have yet to bring the Guantanamo prisoners to trial for war crimes that occurred decades ago. The United States has the most sophisticated and powerful military in world history, yet we left $85 billion of equipment to the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation for the purpose of political optics.
America is at a serious crossroads. We are in the midst of a presidential contest between Donald Trump, who has demonstrated a relatively muscular stance towards Islam, and Kamala Harris, who has suggested we should reject definitive terminology like “radical Islamic terrorism.” If we find ourselves in November with a Harris-Walz victory, we can expect more ignorance of Islam to be integral to America’s policy agenda. It will be an open invitation for stealth jihadists to keep crossing our unguarded borders and will hasten the day when our formerly Christian soil will be unable to nurture anything other than the shahada.
On this anniversary of 9/11, we must admit that we have not known ourselves and we have certainly not known our enemies. We keep ignoring the roots of the Islamic worldview (i.e. the Qur’an and other Islamic holy texts) while concurrently abandoning the cultural heritage that made our civilization the freest and most prosperous in world history. May God grant us repentance before the world as we have known it is subsumed under the boot of Shariah law.
John Steinreich is a Christian historian, author, and the host of the “God and Government” podcast which analyzes political issues through a biblical lens. Follow John on X.
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