Here's one from one of my favorites.
September 11, 2002 8:00 a.m.
The Wages of September 11
There is no going back.
September 11 changed our world. Those who deny such a watershed event take a superficially short-term view, and seem to think all is as before simply because the sun still rises and sets.
This is a colossal misjudgment. The collapse of the towers, the crashing into the Pentagon, and the murder of 3,000 Americans — all seen live in real time by millions the world over — tore off a scab and exposed deep wounds, which, if and when they heal, will leave ugly scars for decades. The killers dealt in icons — the choice of 911 as the date of death, targeting the manifest symbols of global capitalism and American military power, and centering their destruction on the largest Jewish city in the world. Yes, they got their symbols in spades, but they have no idea that their killing has instead become emblematic of changes that they could scarcely imagine.
Islamic fundamentalism has proved not ascendant, but static, morally repugnant — and the worst plague upon the Arab world since the Crusades. By lurking in the shadows and killing incrementally through stealth, the vampirish terrorists garnered bribes and subsidies through threats and bombs; but pale and wrinkled in the daylight after 9/11, they prove only ghoulish not fearsome.
The more the world knows of al Qaeda and bin Laden, the more it has found them both vile and yet banal — and so is confident and eager to eradicate them and all they stand for. It is one thing to kill innocents, quite another to take on the armed might of an aroused United States. Easily dodging a solo cruise missile in the vastness of Afghanistan may make good theater and bring about braggadocio; dealing with grim American and British commandos who have come 7,000 miles for your head prompts abject flight and an occasional cheap infomercial on the run. And the ultimate consequence of the attacks of September 11 will not merely be the destruction of al Qaeda, but also the complete repudiation of the Taliban, the Iranian mullocracy, the plague of the Pakistani madrassas, and any other would-be fundamentalist paradise on earth.
Foreign relations will not be the same in our generation. Our coalition with Europe, we learn, was not a partnership, but more mere alphabetic nomenclature and the mutual back scratching of Euro-American globetrotters — a paper alliance without a mission nearly 15 years after the end of the Cold War. The truth is that Europe, out of noble purposes, for a decade has insidiously eroded its collective national sovereignty in order to craft an antidemocratic EU, a 80,000-person fuzzy bureaucracy whose executive power is as militarily weak as it is morally ambiguous in its reliance on often dubious international accords. This sad realization September 11 brutally exposed, and we all should cry for the beloved continent that has for the moment completely lost its moral bearings. Indeed, as the months progressed the problems inherent in "the European way" became all too apparent: pretentious utopian manifestos in lieu of military resoluteness, abstract moralizing to excuse dereliction of concrete ethical responsibility, and constant American ankle-biting even as Europe lives in a make-believe Shire while we keep back the forces of Mordor from its picturesque borders, with only a few brave Frodos and Bilbos tagging along. Nothing has proved more sobering to Americans than the skepticism of these blinkered European hobbits after September 11.
America learned that "moderate" Arab countries are as dangerous as hostile Islamic nations. After September 11, being a Saudi, Egyptian, or Kuwaiti means nothing special to an American — at least not proof of being any more friendly or hostile than having Libyan, Syrian, or Lebanese citizenship. Indeed, our entire postwar policy of propping up autocracies on the triad of their anticommunism, oil, and arms purchases — like NATO — belongs to a pre-9/11 age of Soviet aggrandizement and petroleum monopolies. Now we learn that broadcasting state-sponsored hatred of Israel and the United States is just as deadly to our interests as scud missiles — and as likely to come from friends as enemies. Worst-case scenarios like Iran and Afghanistan offer more long-term hope than "stable regimes" like the Saudis; governments that hate us have populations that like us — and vice versa; the Saudi royal family, whom 5,000 American troops protect, and the Mubarak autocracy, which has snagged billions of American dollars, are as afraid of democratic reformers as they are Islamic fundamentalists. And with good reason: Islamic governments in Iran and under the Taliban were as hated by the masses as Arab secular reformers in exile in the West are praised and championed.
The post-9/11 domestic calculus is just as confusing. Generals and the military brass call civilians who seek the liberation of Iraq "chicken hawks" and worse. Yet such traditional Vietnam-era invective I think rings hollow after September 11, and sounds more like McClellan's shrillness against his civilian overseers who precipitously wanted an odious slavery ended than resonant of Patton's audacity in charging after murderous Nazis. More Americans were destroyed at work in a single day than all those soldiers killed in enemy action since the evacuation of Vietnam nearly 30 years ago. Indeed, most troops who went through the ghastly inferno of Vietnam are now in or nearing retirement; and, thank God, there is no generation of Americans in the present military — other than a few thousand brave veterans of the Gulf, Mogadishu, and Panama — who have been in sustained and deadly shooting with heavy casualties. Because American soldiers and their equipment are as impressive as our own domestic security is lax, in this gruesome war it may well be more perilous to work high up in lower Manhattan, fly regularly on a jumbo jet, or handle mail at the Pentagon or CIA than be at sea on a sub or destroyer.
Real concern for the sanctity of life may hinge on employing rather than rejecting force, inasmuch as our troops are as deadly and protected abroad as our women, children, aged, and civilians are impotent and vulnerable at home. It seems to me a more moral gamble to send hundreds of pilots into harm's way than allow a madman to further his plots to blow up or infect thousands in high-rises.
Politics have been turned upside down. In the old days, cynical conservatives were forced to hold their noses and to practice a sometimes repellent Realpolitik. In the age of Russian expansionism, they were loathe to champion democracy when it might usher in a socialist Trojan Horse whose belly harbored totalitarians disguised as parliamentarians. Thus they were so often at loggerheads with naïve and idealist leftists.
No longer. The end of the specter of a deadly and aggressive Soviet Communism has revived democratic ideology as a force in diplomacy. Champions of freedom no longer sigh and back opportunistic rightist thugs who promise open economics, loot their treasuries, and keep out the Russians. Instead, even reactionaries are now more likely to push for democratic governments in the Middle East than are dour and skeptical leftists. The latter, if multiculturalists, often believe that democracy is a value-neutral Western construct, not necessarily a universal good; if pacifists, they claim nonintervention, not justice, as their first priority. The Right, not the Left, now is the greater proponent of global freedom, liberation, and idealism — with obvious domestic ramifications for any Republican president astute enough to tap that rich vein of popular support.
All this and more are the wages of the disaster of September 11 and the subsequent terrible year — and yet it is likely that, for good or evil, we will see things even more incredible in the twelve months ahead.
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson.asp