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9.11专题。十年。悼念死难者。
America attacked
The day the world changed
After this unspeakable crime, will anything ever be the same?
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SIX decades ago, a generation of startled Americans awoke to discover that their country was under attack. Pearl Harbour changed America, and therefore the world. Now the children and grandchildren of the Americans who went to war in 1941 have suffered their own day of infamy, one that is no less memorable. The appalling atrocities of September 11th—acts that must be seen as a declaration of war not just on America but on all civilised people—were crueller in conception and even more shocking than what happened in Hawaii. Thousands of innocents lie dead in the wreckage of the World Trade Centre; hundreds more seem likely to have perished at the Pentagon and in a crashed airliner in Pennsylvania. This week has changed America, and with it the world, once again.
In the immediate aftermath, the United States showed signs of what makes it great. In so many ways, and for understandable reasons, it had been unprepared to face such evil. Modern Americans have never learned to live with terrorism or with enemy action of any kind within their borders. They have not needed to. Neither the attack of 1993 on the World Trade Centre nor the bombing in Oklahoma in 1995 had changed that. Even the attack on Pearl Harbour was remote from the country’s heartland. At home, Americans felt safe, in a way they never will again: it made this week’s enormity all the more terrible. Despite everything, the country rallied. Across the United States, people have queued to give blood, to offer help. Airports and stockmarkets have been closed, but there is an urgent desire to return to normality, to carry on and not be cowed. In the country at large there is nothing of hysteria or panic. The mood is grief, purpose, unity, and anger under control. That is admirable.
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In his first messages to the country George Bush spoke well, balancing reassurance and resolve. It did seem a mistake, perhaps a sign of the country’s innocence in these affairs, that Mr Bush should be hurried to safety in Nebraska in the first instance, rather than to the White House or to the ruins in Manhattan or Washington. At such times the president’s security ought not to be the overriding priority: exercising leadership, and being seen to do so, must come first. But if it is fair to call that a momentary mis-step, it was soon put right. The commander-in-chief was quickly seen to take command, and then acquitted himself with credit.
From horror to action
The testing, however, has barely begun. The immediate task of clearing the debris, recovering the dead and counting the full human cost will be daunting in the extreme. (In some ways, the first telephoto images, awesome though they were as spectacle, disguise the human toll of pain and distress.) And as that awful work proceeds, in circumstances hardly conducive to rational analysis, an adequate response to the atrocities must be framed. That is the greatest challenge of all. It must not be a task that the United States undertakes alone.
Even the simplest and most obvious prescriptions, to do with improving security at domestic airports, pose a dilemma. For years, visiting Europeans have been either alarmed or delighted, according to temperament, to discover that boarding an airliner in America is as easy as boarding a train back home: bags checked at the kerb, tickets issued at the flash of a driving licence, minimal or no inspection of cabin baggage. This, it now sadly emerges, was a fool’s paradise. Security at America’s airports will have to be brought up to the same stifling standards as those endured in the rest of the developed world. That will entail much longer queues, much more bureaucracy and even more delays in an industry already detested for all these things.
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Still, that is largely a matter of mere nuisance. Much more worrying is that a new balance between liberty and security may have to be struck more broadly, and not just in the United States. This issue, at any rate, will have to be faced. The attacks called for meticulous planning and co-operation among an extended network of conspirators, yet apparently took the authorities entirely by surprise. This was an extraordinary failure of intelligence-gathering. Critics have long argued that America and its allies have come to rely too much on high-technology snooping for counter-terrorism purposes and not enough on old-fashioned human spying. To meet the threat of an enemy without compunction, who sets the value of human life at naught, governments will need to beef up both. But there is a heavy cost. Spying infringes everyone’s freedom, everyone’s privacy, not just that of the enemy. Just where this balance will be struck, or should be struck in a liberal democracy, remains unclear. In the face of the implacable evil witnessed this week, the answer may have changed.
Next comes the question of America’s overall defence posture, and that of its allies. Mr Bush has given pre-eminence in foreign policy to missile defence. As this paper has said before, it is hard to see why America should be prevented from building a shield to defend itself and its friends against incoming missiles from rogue states if it wants to do so; no country should be deprived of the right to defend itself. Yet any idea that such a shield, if it can be constructed at all, would be enough by itself to guarantee American security, was far-fetched all along. Now it lies with the rubble. Among the enemies of America and the West are men who do not fire missiles, but who hijack aircraft full of fuel and fly them into crowded buildings. The missile-shield programme, whatever its merits, must not militate against efforts to improve security against other kinds of threat.
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Stand together
Counter-terrorism, depending as it does on the pooling of information, also requires international co-operation, something which Mr Bush has, at a minimum, failed to emphasise in his approach to foreign policy. The United States has had good reason in the past to be sceptical about the value of some of its alliances and commitments. And it is right for Mr Bush to put American interests first—all governments should put their own national interests first. But mutually compatible national interests are often best served through co-operation. Without doubt, when it comes to international terrorism, a new spirit of common resolve is indispensable. America’s allies in NATO have proclaimed their willingness to stand up and be counted by invoking for the first time in the history of the organisation its Article 5 on mutual defence, which binds the signatories to regard an attack on one member as an attack on all. That is what it was: an attack on all. The symbolism of the gesture is everything one could wish. Now America must demand, and receive, the tangible support it implies.
Lastly comes the question which is uppermost in most minds, the most treacherous question of all—that of retaliation. The problem is not merely that the American authorities still seem unsure who is to blame. Suspicion points to Osama bin Laden, but there are other possibilities, including, just conceivably, home-grown lunatics. Soon it will no doubt be possible to say with confidence who the perpetrators were. But if it does turn out to be bin Laden, that by itself will not give the answer to the question: “How much force in reply?”
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America and the West—again, in their own interests—must recognise and reflect upon the hostility they face in parts of the world. Scenes of Palestinians and other Muslims celebrating this week’s horrors may seem an unendurable provocation, but America must take care in the coming days that it does not create more would-be martyrs than, through military action, it can destroy. The strategy—easier said than done, to put it mildly—must be to make friends with opponents who are capable of reason, while moving firmly against those who are both incapable of it and willing to resort to, or assist in, acts such as those seen this week. The response of America and its allies should not be timid, but it should be measured.
Is there a danger that America will choose, in the end, to retreat behind a different kind of shield—not one that guards against missiles, but one that aims to shut out the world? The United States, no less than other great powers, has had an isolationist streak (George Washington said it was his true policy “to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world”). Our belief, and our fervent hope, is that the answer is No. Thanks to America, and only thanks to America, the world has enjoyed these past decades an age of hitherto unimagined freedom and opportunity. Those who would deflect it from its path must not, and surely will not, succeed.
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From The Economist:
http://www.economist.com/node/780341
Ten Years -- We Are Still Missing the Lessons of 9/11
By Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser
In recent years and even weeks, the lessons of September 11, 2001 have been lost to constant distraction, the most recent being Mayor Bloomberg’s unfathomable decision to forbid people of faith a role at the tenth anniversary commemoration.
Faith was the impetus for the attack, faith was the instrument for healing, and faith is the only hope we have to defeat the ideology that attacked us ten years ago.
Bloomberg’s stance encapsulates our greatest liabilities as a nation ten years after 9/11. We, now, more than ever, lack the political will, the national skill sets, and the prominent American Muslim leadership willing to identify, engage, and defeat Islamism.
While many Muslims take the bait of victimology preached by supposed Muslim civil rights groups in America, as American Muslims the rest of us cannot continue to deny the connection no matter how unfair between certain interpretations of our faith and Al Qaeda’s brutal attack.
Usama bin Laden did not just represent a handful of militant extremists. He was a standard bearer for an end stage of a global ideology – political Islam (Islamism) – that has buried its roots deep within interpretations of our faith. Islamism is a theo-political construct that believes in the supremacy of the Islamic state and that is the antithesis of what makes America unique and exceptional. It can only be defeated by Muslims who step beyond the distractions and denials and champion an ideological path that binds our identity and faith to liberty and individual freedom.
If American Muslim leaders want to do anything to combat fear of Islamism and any unfair association of all Muslims that may exist, the most effective move would be to form an offensive strategy against Islamists and their ideas from within.
My family came to the U.S. in the 1960’s escaping Syria’s Baathist oppression in order to be free, more free than they ever dreamed of being in Muslim majority nations.
Yet, it is unconscionable that 10 years after 9/11, the United States is still dithering over the root cause of Islamist terror.
Islamists detest the very fabric of American society. September 11 was not the first attack and it was not the last. If we do not engage in a full throated ideological fight we will continue to witness an ever increasing threat to our homeland.
Sadly, the America I know that I chose to serve as a naval officer has spent an uncharacteristically sheepish decade asleep against the greatest existential threat to our survival. We must now develop and implement a coherent tactical plan to defeat the ideological root of militant Islamism- political Islam and the dreams for some Muslims of the Islamic state.
The threat to the United States has grown exponentially in ten years. A report from the Department of Justice in March of 2010 showed that of 228 terror-related arrests 186 of them were Muslim. That is over 80 percent from a Muslim community that represents less than 2 percent of the U.S. population.
What this report does not tell us is that of the 186 Muslim arrests almost certainly all of them were Muslims that believed in and adhered to an Islamist ideology. Since this report we have seen upwards of another 28 terror-related arrests of Muslims including the likes of Faisal Shahzad -- the Times Square bomber -- and Pvt. Naser Abdo who was preparing a second attack on Fort Hood who both claimed to be “Muslim soldiers” fighting for the ummah (Muslim nation).
The threat is increasing because the ideological message has largely gone unchecked. To change that we need to empower reform-minded liberal Muslim leaders. We need the political will from the Administration and Congress to identify political Islam as the problem and devout reformist Muslims and enlightened Islam as the solution. We need our government, media, and academe to have the skill set to not cower when terms like “Islamophobia” are leveled against those who are smart enough and brave enough to call out political Islam as the problem and we need for Muslims to separate religion and state to defeat Islamism. Unless we do that, our “whack-a-mole” approach to security will eventually miss one.
Western pluralistic societies that embrace individual liberty are not in conflict with the faith of Islam as practiced by most Muslims. This is not a war against a religion. We cannot allow our ideological enemy to use faith to tie our hands in this fight. Hear that Mayor Bloomberg? Mr. President? PC police? We must break the shackles of political correctness and step beyond the fear that paralyzes us against matters that happen to touch on faith.
The founding fathers never intended for faith to be sacrosanct and beyond public discourse. Perhaps the greatest outcome of the American experiment is that the U.S. Constitution reclaimed faith from the hands of the monarch and the clergy and vested it in the hands of the people as it was always intended. Now faced with an existential theo-political threat, we are failing that vision and need to rededicate ourselves to our founding principles.
The only way to win is to stop playing defense and create an offensive strategy which empowers liberty-minded Muslims whose identity is tied to Americanism and our Establishment Clause, rather than Islamism, shar’iah, and victimhood. We must tackle the fallacy of the Islamic state and demonstrate to Muslims the religious strength that comes from individual liberty.
We have yet to operationalize these lessons of 9/11. We will not win this struggle and therefore never have true national security without confronting the hard issues of Islamist ideology. Our enemy does not suffer the same malady and in fact utilizes ideology as their primary weapon in this battle.
We must do the same. Our dedication to the concepts of liberty and unyielding belief in the inalienable rights of man as endowed by our creator are the key to our victory.
From Fox News: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/09/10/ten-years-are-still-missing-lessons-11/#ixzz1XYYiKbwJ |
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发表于 2011-9-10 21:40:59
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