9/11/2011

Here again is the passage from a column by Victor Davis Hanson that I posted last week.

If one had collated everything candidate Obama declaimed about the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policies from autumn of 2007 to November 2008, then one would have expected a President Obama to dismantle the entire Bush-Cheney national-security apparatus upon entering office, to pull out of Iraq (he originally said this should be done by March 2008, no less), and to keep our military out of the Middle East. Instead, Obama retained Secretary of Defense Gates, stuck to the Bush-Petraeus withdrawal plan in Iraq, expanded Predator-drone attacks in Waziristan, surged into Afghanistan, bombed Libya, and embraced everything from Guantanamo to renditions. That about-face, I think, was the most radical political development of the last quarter-century, and was treated with near silence by the media. It was as if Moveon.org, Code Pink, and Michael Moore had simply vanished from the face of the earth sometime around January 2009.

The question is, Why? Why did President Obama so casually and thoroughly discard Candidate Obama’s firmly stated (if not firmly held) belief that his predecessor’s antiterrorism policies were needless, ineffective and damaging? A belief shared nearly unanimously by his liberal-left base and by much of the sycophantic media.

The answer is (or should be) obvious. Candidate Obama, being Obama, didn’t know what he was talking about. He was ignorant, as were (are) his supporters, of the seriousness of the threat facing the U.S. from Islamic extremism. That threat isn’t just some concoction of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz neo-con cabal. It’s real. Bush’s final Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, is one of the most passionate and convincing spokesmen warning of the dangers we face. He notes that as a federal judge, the bench did little to prepare him to deal with the daily briefing he received as AG about the threat to America. “It is way beyond, way beyond anything that I knew or believed”.

Once Obama learned the details of the threat, he had no choice but to maintain the elaborate and highly successful anti-terrorism architecture that Bush had put in place. After all, as Mark Steyn points out, Obama can’t have a terrorist attack interfering with his plan to impose his socialist vision on the country.

As I saw it in November, 2008, there would be three beneficial consequences to Obama’s election. 1) The U.S. would have its first black president; 2) Democrats would be forced to accept the reality of the War against Radical Islam; and 3) We would be spared the calamity of a President Hillary Clinton. The first two have been realized. There’s a better than even chance the third will be.

A couple of good 9/11 columns –

Charles Krauthammer castigates those who deny the success of our reaction to the 9/11 attacks.

Our current difficulties and gloom are almost entirely economic in origin, the bitter fruit of misguided fiscal, regulatory, and monetary policies that had nothing to do with 9/11. America’s current demoralization is not a result of the War on Terror. On the contrary. The denigration of the War on Terror is the result of our current demoralization, of retroactively reading today’s malaise into the real — and successful — history of our 9/11 response.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/276694/911-overreaction-nonsense-charles-krauthammer

And Mark Steyn writes what you would expect him to write for this anniversary, deriding the touchy-feely commemorations that completely miss the true significance of 9/11.

Upon arrival at the foot of the towers, two firemen were hit by falling bodies. “There is no other way to put it,” one of their colleagues explained. “They exploded.”
Any room for that on the Metropolitan Museum’s “Peace Quilt”? Sadly not. We’re all out of squares.

Mayor Bloomberg’s office has patiently explained, there’s “not enough room” at the official Ground Zero commemoration to accommodate any firemen. “Which is kind of weird,” wrote the Canadian blogger Kathy Shaidle, “since 343 of them managed to fit into the exact same space ten years ago.”

343 NYFD firemen died that day.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/276803/let-s-roll-over-mark-steyn