A few unorganized thoughts regarding the events in New York:
(1) We lost. Our moral posturing about our degradation is merely
embarrassing. We have been made fools of, expertly and calculatedly, in the
greatest military defeat the country has suffered since we fled from Viet
Nam. The Moslem world is laughing and dancing in the streets. The rest of
the earth, while often sympathetic, sees us as the weak and helpless nation
that we are.
The casualty figures aren't in, but 10,000 dead seems reasonable, and we
wring our hands and speak of grief therapy.
We lost.
(2) We cannot stop it from happening again. Thousands of aircraft constantly
use O'Hare, a few minutes flying time from the Sears Tower.
(3) Our politicians and talking heads speak of "a cowardly act of
terrorism." It was neither cowardly nor, I think, terrorism. Hijacking an
aircraft and driving it into a building isn't cowardly. Would you do it? It
requires great courage and dedication -- which our enemies have, and we do
not. One may mince words, but to me the attack looked like an act of war.
Not having bombing craft of their own, they used ours. When we bombed Hanoi
and Hamburg, was that terrorism?
(4) The attack was beautifully conceived and executed. These guys are good.
They were clearly looking to inflict the maximum humiliation on the United
States, in the most visible way possible, and they did. The sight of those
two towers collapsing will leave nobody's mind. If we do nothing of
importance in return, and it is my guess that we won't, the entire earth
will see that we are a nation of epicenes. Silly cruise-missile attacks on
Afghanistan will just heighten the indignity.
(5) In watching the coverage, I was struck by the tone of passive
acquiescence. Not once, in hours of listening, did I hear anyone express
anger. No one said, coldly but in deadly seriousness, "People are going to
die for this, a whole lot of people." There was talk of tracking down bin
Laden and bringing him to justice. "Terrorism experts" spoke of months of
investigation to find who was responsible, which means we will do nothing.
Blonde bimbos babbled of coping strategies and counseling and how our
children needed support. There was no talk of retaliation.
(6) The Israelis, when hit, hit back. They hit back hard. But Israel is run
by men. We are run by women. Perhaps two-thirds of the newscasters were
blonde drones who spoke of the attack over and over as a tragedy, as though
it had been an unusually bad storm -- unfortunate, but inevitable, and now
we must get on with our lives. The experts and politicians, nominally male,
were effeminate and soft little things. When a feminized society runs up
against male enemies -- and bin Laden, whatever else he is, is a man -- it
loses. We have.
(7) We haven't conceded that the Moslem world is our enemy, nor that we are
at war. We see each defeat and humiliation in isolation, as a unique
incident unrelated to anything else. The 241 Marines killed by the truck
bomb in Beirut, the extended humiliation of the hostages taken by Iran, the
war with Iraq, the bombing of the Cole, the destruction of the embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania, the devastation of the Starke, the Saudi barracks, the
dropping of airliner after airliner -- these we see as anecdotes, like
pileups of cars on a snowy road. They see these things as war.
We face an enemy more intelligent than we are.
(8) We think we are a superpower. Actually we are not, except in the useless
sense of having nuclear weapons. We could win an air war with almost anyone,
yes, or a naval war in mid-Pacific. Few Americans realize how small our
forces are today, how demoralized and weakened by social experimentation. If
we had to fight a ground war in terrain with cover, a war in which we would
take casualties, we would lose.
(9) I have heard some grrr-woofwoofery about how we should invade
Afghanistan and teach those ragheads a lesson. Has anyone noticed where
Afghanistan is? How would we get there? Across Pakistan, a Moslem country?
Or through India? Do we suppose Iran would give us overflight rights to bomb
another Moslem country? Or will our supply lines go across Russia through
Turkmenistan? Do we imagine that we have the airlift or sealift? What effect
do we think bombing might have on Afghanistan, a country that is essentially
rubble to begin with?
We backed out of Somalia, a Moslem country, when a couple of GIs got killed
and dragged through the streets on TV. Afghans are not pansies. They whipped
the Russians. Our sensitive and socially-conscious troops would curl up in
balls.
(10) To win against a more powerful enemy, one forces him to fight a kind of
war for which he isn't prepared. Iraq lost the Gulf War because it fought
exactly the kind of war in which American forces are unbeatable: Hussein
played to his weaknesses and our strengths. The Vietnamese did the opposite.
They defeated us by fighting a guerrilla war that didn't give us anything to
hit. They understood us. We didn't understand them.
The Moslem world is doing the same thing. Because their troops, or
terrorists as we call them, are not sponsored by a country, we don't know
who to hit. Note that Yasser Arafat, bin Laden, and the Taliban are all
denying any part in the destruction of New York. At best, we might, with our
creaky intelligence apparatus, find Laden and kill him. It's not worth
doing: Not only would he have defeated America as nobody ever has, but he
would then be a martyr. Face it: The Arabs are smarter than we are.
(11) We are militarily weak because we have done what we usually do: If no
enemy is immediately in sight, we cut our forces to the bone, stop most R&D,
and focus chiefly on sensitivity training about homosexuals. When we need a
military, we don't have one. Then we are inutterably surprised.
(12) The only way we could save any dignity and respect in the world be to
hit back so hard as to make teeth rattle around the world. A good approach
would be to have NSA fabricate intercepts proving that Libya was
responsible, mobilize nationally, invade, and make Libya permanently a US
colony. Most Arab countries are militarily helpless, and that is the only
kind our forces could defeat. Doing this, doing anything other than
whimpering, would require that ancient military virtue known as "balls."
Does Katie Couric have them?
