Immediately after September 11th, we were uniformly told to believe that the next terrorist attack on the U.S. was inevitable. It would surely come, it was repeatedly asserted, and the only questions were the exact location(s) and the extent of the damage it would cause. Alarm and concerns about domestic security were, understandably, at an all-time high.
Many liberals in the media, academia and the political world were increasingly willing to question America's dependence on Middle Eastern oil and other resources, as well as our formidable military presence in the region. They held up these factors as potential justification for the terrorist strikes - as if we operate in a world where the wishes of cold-blooded, inhumane mass murderers should ever be looked at as diplomatic negotiation tactics - in the same way that Osama bin Laden justified September 11th and threatened future catastrophic strikes if we did not re-deploy our troops from Saudi Arabia.
Nevertheless, it has been the Bush Administration and other national GOP leaders that have been clear-eyed and resilient in the fight for the continued survival of our civilization in the face of strengthening calls for our withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan. The war on terrorism has emerged as the defining struggle of our time in the same way that World War II came to define, coalesce and embolden our grandparents' generation. It is indeed a fight we can't walk away from, and a crisis we cannot avert. The alternative - allowing Islamic extremists to sense our blood in the water and rally around our potential defeat - would spell disaster and doom in a calamitous way that would render our homeland increasingly susceptible to attack. Those calling for our precipitous withdrawal from the Middle East do not have the slightest sense of how much this would reinvigorate al-Qaida's cause and enliven its sense of triumph.
Regretfully, our actions and intentions - military, political, diplomatic, humanitarian - need to be right and just 100 percent of the time for us to claim the moral or ethical high ground and consistently prove to the world that we are fighting this war on our terms, and not on the terrorists' terms. Conversely, the extremists who so willfully and maliciously expend energy in the pursuit of our unequivocal annihilation need only be correct 1 out of 100 times to exact the type of devastation and destruction which brought our nation to its collective knees six years ago this month. In this way, we are - of course - winning this struggle, in the sense that we have denied the terrorists the means to successfully attack our homeland since September 11th occurred. Similarly, we have gone abroad politically and militarily and destabilized terrorists' strongholds and financial organizations with such stunning success that al-Qaida is only a shell of its former self. All the while, our collective national attention has been fixed not on them but on Iraq for the past three years.
And, given the fact that President Bush has been the first American President who has treated the struggle against Islamic fanaticism with the proper caution, seriousness and combative resources - and has mobilized and unleashed a military more than capable of taking the fight to them, so as to keep the homeland safe - I submit that commentators and historians years from now will hold him in much higher esteem than current opinion polls. Despite his many blunders in Iraq in the past few years, the president's initial and swift response to September 11th in Afghanistan undoubtedly got the attention of Bin Laden and other advocates for America's demise. To be sure, the attacks six years ago strengthened our collective resolve in an essential and enduring way and woke us up to the fact that we are at war - and will be at war indefinitely - with enemies so maniacal and hell-bent on our obliteration that they would blow up their own young men to achieve their desired objective.
As a result, we now live in a transformed world; undoubtedly, a world where a war in Iraq or Afghanistan has to be thought of as a theoretical preference for the United States, simply because it is not occurring on our own soil. We have become a global superpower in every sense of the term, and our economic and military interests abroad are indeed paramount to our prosperity and safety at home. Our enemies in the caves of Pakistan and Afghanistan understand this all too well, and are therefore doing everything within their reach to ensure that we renounce our interests in the Middle East.
Our response to this formidable threat has so far been commendable and characterized by resilience and diligence. The proof is found in the fact that under President Bush's leadership we have not been attacked since September 11th. And, despite his many shortcomings, President Bush does indeed possess the right mindset for dealing with our unconventional enemies - deploy large numbers of highly trained and multifariously skilled Special Forces to hunt them down and kill them.
Our next President, especially if a negotiation-inclined Democrat, may not recognize this threat for what it is - the supreme test of the will of the Western World to fight for its principles of democracy, liberty and freedom. And whether or not we correctly identify the threat or withdraw from Iraq, the war for our civilization's survival will furiously wage on - our enemies have clearly assured us of that.
Brad DeFlumeri is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at bedeflume@student.umass.edu.
Be the first to comment on this article!