Thursday, September 10, 2015

9/11: From Osama to Obama, the Defeat of the West? (Part I)

I have written a lot about 9/11 and won't repeat all that stuff about where I was and what I was doing. You can find it in the archives if you're so inclined. The anniversary of that day, however, has rolled around again, and I can't help but reflect on all that has happened since. As the military say, bottom line up front (BLUF), I think we might have seen the defeat of the West take place in those fourteen years.

So much has happened since that horrid day in 2001. Most of us, well, some of us, at least, can't forget the thousands killed on that day by the Religion of Peace, nor the thousands more who have died in the ensuing battles of what is a 1400 year long war waged against us by the Religion of Peace.

Prior to that day, the West had grown complacent. The Cold War had ended in a whimper; the Soviets and their Evil Empire had melted like the wicked witch in Wizard of Oz. No mushroom clouds required; no duck and cover exercises needed. The West had triumphed over the Bloc. We had prominent professors telling us we had reached the End of History, and, of course, those Soviets weren't really Marxists, after all. The great international ideological battles had ended. Besides, who would attack us? Especially, who would attack the USA? Who would dare? Why? How?

Sure we saw acts of terror overseas, yes, in that mythical, dirty, and dangerous place called overseas--the place where those odd foreigners live. Sure, some embassies had been attacked, but what do embassies really do? How does that affect life here? So-called "terror" was a matter for law enforcement, UN resolutions, and the Israelis to handle. We would focus on issues of trade, drugs, climate change, people smuggling, gender equality, gay rights, and seeing movies that make fun of Serbs and other Slavs, but mostly we would party hearty. War with Islam? How Crusader of you!

Wrong. All wrong.

The days immediately after 9/11/2001 were of shock and horror. We had been attacked in our largest city and in our capital not by Russian or Chinese missiles, not by some Hollywoodian Serbian master criminals, but by a bunch of wealthy Saudi students living it up in our midst. Armed with box cutters, an Islamic death wish, and obeying orders from a rich scrofulous Saudi expat living in a dirty Afghan hut, they killed thousands of us here at home by hijacking civilian aircraft and smashing them into buildings. More dead than at Pearl Harbor. Not over there. Not in some horrid foreign place. Right here in America. And, gosh, we had treated these boys so well, too, even had Muslim prayer rooms in the airport and halal food on board . . .  they couldn't have been real Muslims, right? We must have done something wrong . . .

While the progressives and their enablers wrung their hands and looked for the causes of Muslim anger, ordinary folks--American, British, Australian, Canadian, and others around the world--went to war. I can tell you as somebody serving overseas at the time as Charge of a US Embassy, there was an electric current running through the air. The Bush people spoke loudly and clearly and laid down one of the great foreign policy lines of our time: "We appreciate your expressions of sympathy and condolences, but now you are either with us or against us." Captained by a furious United States President with blood in his eye, the Western allies moved at record speed and with overwhelmingly lethal force. At home, everybody it seemed was flying the flag; the military recruitment centers were overwhelmed with volunteers. Those were heady days to be an diplomat in the hard countries. Foreign officials listened very intently to what you said; those not particularly well-disposed to us knew that the American diplomat standing in front of them represented a President who had and would pull the trigger. Not many wanted to risk being seen as "against us." The Al Qaeda gang and their Taliban backers never knew what hit them. In weeks they were dead, or on the run.

Not long after, the reprehensible and murderous Saddam--who had sought and used WMD--joined the AQ criminals on the run. He was eventually dug out of a spider hole and sent to trial and the gallows for his many acts of brutality. Libya's transgender Queen of the Desert, too, got the message and notified us that he/she no longer had an interest in developing nukes and surrendered his/her whole program to us. In addition, his/her people helped us round up AQ goons all over the world--I know; I worked with them.

The West, and the USA, in particular, seemed to have an unassailable position of strength. Alas, that was not to last. Even at this moment of victory, the seeds of defeat had begun to germinate.

Tomorrow In a couple of days we will discuss what flowered.


28 comments:

  1. I remember to this day, in a discussion with my family during that terrible week, I angrily stated that "before long, the liberals among us will be claiming that all this was somehow our fault, and that we had no right to attack these far-off people".

    I never really expected it to come true.

    Graham

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    1. I recall the day rather clearly. I recall the shut down of air space over the NY metro area and how quiet it was relative to normal air traffic. Only pierced by military jets flying a racetrack pattern over Long Island. I could stand out in my garden and watch them trying to protect me.
      My son had been accepted to USNA just a month before. Then the phone call came, "Mrs. M, we would like you, your husband and your son to come down to the Naval Academy for a briefing." I remember the sandbags and the Marines and the machine guns and the totally tight security to get onto the yard. I remember being terribly scared. Our son was 16 at the time and would be 17 upon entering the academy...
      What we were told was that our son would almost certainly be involved in a war. If he didn't want to do that then all he had to do was sign his name to the back of a post card and mail it in. I remember him throwing the post card in the trash.
      Our son served 10 years in the Navy and did see action. He came home to us safe and sound. It seems really remarkable that Mr. Obama saw fit to put our son in jeopardy and then squander his service the way he did.
      While my son was deployed I followed very closely open source info regarding events. I knew my son was in the Eastern Med. He was due to come home when he sent an email that they had been turned back and would be deployed for another month at least. I emailed him that they had interdicted an Iranian arms shipment bound for Gaza, or Syria, can't remember and that they were going to bottle them up in Cyprus. He emailed back "MOM, YOU ARE SO WRONG." Of course, I was right...
      I can't tell you how much I resent Mr. Obama for putting my son in jeopardy and, for what?

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  2. Until around 2005, I disapproved of Lincoln's suppression of civil liberties during the Civil War. After seeing the way the Left behaved, I've changed my mind. Bush needed to take it as an example. If you go to war, the first order of business must be to go down to Capitol Hill and throw the most anti-war member of Congress into prison...accompanied by a half-dozen members of the press.

    Thee's a VAST difference between Loyal Opposition and Quislings. The latter deserve nothing but a prison cell.

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  3. Perhaps there is a glimmer of hope in the news that Austria is going to insist that Muslim preachers preach in German and that they use a German translation of the Koran. The next step will be to expurgate those bits against the law. In England, I would hope that the law against incitement of religious hatred is tightened up and enforced.

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    1. backofanenvelope, Good luck my friend. It's bad enough here but you guys
      are even worse off. My two infamous words are; APATHY and COMPLACENCY. No one to blame but ourselves.

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  4. I remember going in to our university department office and seeing the towers being hit on TV. It was utterly gut-wrenching, but I think I now know how my parents felt when Pearl Harbor was bombed.

    Yet I think a far larger threat is a cultural, academic, political, and legal elite determined to destroy Western civilization. They demand that _Piss Christ_ be displayed at taxpayer expense, but now are being taught not to blaspheme by an utterly savage religion and culture.

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  5. I had every sympathy for a punitive expedition to Afghanistan, but to turn it into a War of Occupation, with all the dreary rubbish about nation-building, was nuts.

    I had, and have, no sympathy at all for the foolish Iraq adventure. In fact I'm so stumped for any rational explanation for that folly that I still wonder if there was a real but secret justification.

    As for turning on Gadaffy, the heart sinks. God knows how much effort went in to taming him, and all the advantage of that success was thrown away. Then the US stirs up Syria: clearly there is to be no end to the folly in the Middle East.

    Meantime the US has been rattling the bear's cage, driving it into the arms of China.

    Does nobody in DC try to identify vital American interests, and advocate limiting foreign policy largely to defending them?

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    1. You've touched on some of the themes in my next post.

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  6. And it's just this hour too. Have long lived in Boston or suburbs, and on the morning of Sept. 11th oh so long ago but really just yesterday, I walked into my place of business in Boston's Back Bay near Mass. Ave. (no longer there) to be greeted by an employee who couldn't speak. Two of us decided to do the one thing that might help, and leaving one employee alone (which we hardly do) drove to Chinatown area where there's a Red Cross blood bank. The drive there was eerily easy; somehow traffic had evaporated. Parking near the blood bank was near impossible, but then it always is and must be creative, yet all in vain as when we approach the Red Cross the line was out the door, the too few nurses over-whelmed.

    Fast forward @ 18 months. It's a Saturday morn, Feb./March?, and need to walk to a bank, just several blocks. A protest march was in progress, an 'anti-war' march as advertised, with thousands streaming up Mass. Ave. from MIT and Mass. Ave. Bridge yelling (and cursing). The march turned at the Boylston street corner where I had to cross so took a while, and thus had ample time to read the signs/placards protesters were carrying. A large percentage of these signs were anti-Bush. The liberals never forgave nor forgot the 2000 election, and was stunning to me that this was more important than war and the reasons pro/con.

    And current administration should never have abandoned Iraq in 2011.....

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    1. yeah... Obama would have to convince Putin to submit all of russia to US rule in order to compensate for the long term damage he did to his foreign policy legacy by high-tailing it out of a winning situation "hey.. we've stabilized Iraq now.. they've got it.. staying here is just going to create more problems..." *bzzzzt*
      Sure *nobody* is saying this right now.... it'll show up about 30 years from now when historians start saying: "Wait.. why the heck did we just up and leave that powder keg there?"

      - reader #1482

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  7. Even at this moment of victory, the seeds of defeat had begun to germinate in the soil of humiliation. Under the gentle rain of propaganda and the harsh sun of fanaticism, the stalks of misery rose into the air of Muslim Spring. Tomorrow we will discuss what flowered.

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    1. "Even at this moment of victory, the seeds of defeat had begun to germinate in the soil of humiliation."

      Indeed.

      How in the heck of all possible people, Paul Bremer 'just happened' to be available?

      ***

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  8. Yep, 90% of our ills caused by our semi-fearless genius leaders and the other 10% by the bad guys just recognizing the easy targets we've become courtesy of the above.
    James the Lesser

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  9. That reminds me of Obama's jv statement. Considering what ISIS has accomplished since then and they are "jv", what does that make you O man?

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  10. It's as if 9/11 forced the left's hand, they had to act right then or lose. So they set off the charges they'd buried in the foundations of the West over all the long years, and brought us down as surely as the Towers fell on 9/11.

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  11. From the ending of an ?overall? (meaning I have some few disagreements with the assessment) pretty good post:

    "By wanting to avoid war, Obama may have helped cause a far greater one than anything yet seen in post-Saddam Iraq."

    "At this point, Obama’s Iraq war, which he tried and failed to get out of, has lasted longer than Bush’s Iraq war. Neither has been anything resembling a success. There is ample blame to go around. It is important now that our Iraq debates not become even more freighted down with partisan food-fighting than they already are, since the consequences of more Da’ish victories will be terrible. But we cannot assess what to do now if we cannot honestly reckon with the mistakes that we have already made in Iraq. Who Lost Iraq? We all did."

    http://20committee.com/2015/05/22/americas-top-five-mistakes-in-iraq/

    ***

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  12. For heaven's sake, can this be true?
    http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/after-the-iraq-disaster-now-comes-the-pentagons-syria-debacle/

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    1. Didn't bother Dearieme to read beyond the link's final three words but;

      'Fraid so.

      You can find the evidence yourself if you know which three places to look: CIA, DIA, CENTCOM.

      For precedent you might pull up a YouTube of General Shinseki (when he was still a uniformed General) testifying before the Senate Committee Pre-Iraq as to his "informed estimate" as to how many troops it would take to accomplish what he was being asked to accomplish.

      Massaging the Intel is what they call it inside The Beltway.

      ***

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    2. Dearieme?

      Another *handy* precedent.

      http://warontherocks.com/2015/09/warchives-cooking-the-books-on-the-islamic-state-and-the-viet-cong/

      ***

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    3. Uh oh Dearieme, I see I should've read your link first before "just guessing" what Mr. Stockman's beef actually was ... *apparently Dearieme* you're not expending much effort keeping up where "us [the Executive & Congress]" and Syrian *Vetted Moderates* are concerned.

      However - One of Diplomad's Regulars has had a keen eye on what Mr. Stockman just today posts on - LB however posted on the stuff back Forty Days + Ago.

      http://libertybellediaries.com/2015/08/02/obamas-isis-strategy-fubar/

      Apologies Dearieme. I was simply pressed for time.

      ***

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    4. Well fear not! We know the mongoloid Russians are landing troops in Syria to help what is left of Assad's forces. Maybe a good place to tie down the Russians and bleed them out some.

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    5. Well Whitewall "Fear not" because the Russians are landing in a place where Christians and Jews have been living peaceably (relatively ... keep in mind the neighborhood) for the past 1400 years under Alawite rule and not getting their throats slit and the young girls taken into even the sort of slavery our hyphenated "African"-Americans - were Assad Anglo - get really pissed off about?

      "The Russians are landing!"

      So f'ing what?

      Like the Russians are gonna make things "bad" in Syria?

      *Appears about the same to me as nearabout a year ago My Friend Whitewall - the number of mercs appears pretty steady 2000 or so engaged actively - but heck there's very likely that many guys holding US passports in Daesh nevermind the Europeans and Brits.

      And come to think of it, McCain & Company hasn't exactly given me any more confidence in the *vetting application* than the Obama's DoD app process either. And really Whitewall, a half billion bucks to train 50 "troops" which immediately upon insertion from (apparently Jordan) gets captured? Taken prisoner?

      Think about those last two interrogatories a millisecond Whitewall ... Yeah I know we're old these days but even as crippled up as I am there is no fucking way I'd allow US armed me - and if you Whitewall were with me - to "just get immediately captured" equipped as we'd surely be - remember there are only 50 of "us" and there's been $500,000,000.00 spent getting us across the fucking border to ... what ... get decapitated?

      I know you North Carolina boys and I reckon you know us Arkansas boys - that shit ain't gonna happen.
      ___

      Now I "do not know" Whitewall but I'm figuring according to everything I'm aware of - & you remember the commentor "Able" (Brit) who used to comment on Dip's site some - more on D&N (in the Baltics region now) well ... All I will put on Dip's blog is I figure, pretty reliably in my military mind - the total of "exposed to combat" Russians has held pretty steady since the alleged Sarin use to nearabouts 2000.

      Now is there or has there been a fairly recent "beefing up" of Russian uniformed guys near Tartus and Laktokia - I'd guess "very likely." But do I think any of our NATO "allies" have the balls for such a thing? Highly UnLikely. Heck Whitewall look at the Invasion of Europe.

      The Russians on the other hand have very recent experience with those extremely nasty Wahhabists who - for whatever reason always seem to have some ties to those Saudi bastards with connections to Chechnya.

      My guess is - and that's all it is, a guess - somehow the flood of "refugees" trying to get across the Aegean must be stopped. The only possible way I see now is some sort of "Safe Zone" in northern Syria which the Turks aren't gonna like.

      But with the Russians involved consolidating western Syria - and bear in mind Obama's "selling" his Iran Ice-to-the Eskimos bullshit (not to mention our 400+ days to electing a President)

      Not a single politician on Planet Earth is gonna be unhappy all us "otherwise concerned voters" are very baffled by all the bullshit.

      ***

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  13. Greeting from Downunder.

    When the second aircraft hit I commented to my wife this was not an accident. Instead, it was a Muslim attack on America.

    My reasoning was straightforward. Between 1990 - 1995 I lived in Riyadh and regularly from the mosque near my workplace came hysterical screaming and ranting directed against the West and its people. Five years of this sulphuric vitriol convinced me the general feeling was strongly anti the West.

    We cannot win this war, as our leaders surrendered in the first week after the attacks by proclaiming Islam is a religion of peace. This mystifying gobbledygook has continued ever since, with very few politicians prepared to say otherwise.

    How can one win a war by insisting your enemy is not the problem?

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    1. "How can one win a war by insisting your enemy is not the problem?"

      http://www.duffelblog.com/2015/06/pentagon-to-supply-isis-directly/

      ***

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    2. "Peace", as in "Rest in.."

      That said, I felt Bush's assertion was a deliberate attempt to usurp the written word. I don't think his advisers knew what they were up against when they designed that plan.

      - reader #1482

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  14. If their intention is to win by abusing the fact that we aim to love our enemies, they will fail on two accounts: 1) very few of us manage to love our enemies, 2) when we love our enemies, we actually *do* win. Many will reject this notion or rationalize this as some sort of 'counterintuition', others see it as divine providence.

    Now here's rub... we don't do any of that... Are we asked to 'express love' by taking in refugees? No. Are we asked to 'express love' to the poor by feeding them or providing them with clothes and shelter? No. The left asks us to 'express love' by voting for higher taxes to fund government social programs.... yes... divorce us from the mutual benefit of giving to the needy and instead let the soulless government pull their margin off the money while sucking the spiritual value into the void. Anesthetize us to the value of basic human decency.
    Voting isn't an expression of love, no matter how we cut it. It's not an expression of hate either. It's just a void... a nullary expression.

    For a good laugh, ask a lefty for their definition of 'love'. :)


    - reader #1482

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  15. Very interesting post, looking forward to your next installment.

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