9/11 and American resolve

I spent most of today trying to think of something profound and moving to say about 9/11.

I thought of lots of stuff I could say. Trouble was, either I or somebody else has already said it. So no heart strings will be tugged today in this space. No great rhetoric will be attempted. I'll confine myself to an observation not so much about 9/11 or its victims or its heroes as about 9/11 and us.

"For one brief, shining moment," as Alan Jay Lerner might have put it, united we stood. America had been attacked. We forgot whether we were Republicans, Democrats, or Independents. We forgot whether we had voted for Gore or for Bush. We forgot, many of us, our instinctive distaste for New York's perceived brashness and insularity and provincialism, and the obnoxious sense of superiority to the rest of the country it often seems to project. We were all New Yorkers.

Eastern, Midwestern, Southern, Southeastern, Far Western, urban, suburban, rural- none of that mattered in the least All we knew is that we had been attacked. And "we" was not just New York. It was Pumpkin Center and Butte and Ocala and Baton Rouge and La Jolla and Castle Rock and very city, town and village in the United States.

It is said that in the wake of Pearl Harbor, Admiral Yamamoto remarked, "I fear that all we have accomplished has been to awaken a sleeping giant, and fill it with a terrible resolve." We all felt that resolve in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the heroic re-taking and self-immolation of Flight 93.

But it's gone. Somehow, it leaked away.

Partisanship- even more bitter and divisive than that of the Vietnam era, and probably more so than at any time since the Civil War- has divided us instead, and the very moment when we could least afford it. Fault-finding and ill-will and petty bickering has replaced unity. We have lost that resolve.

The Administration has done well in making us safer. At least twenty more attacks on American soil have been foiled since 9/11. But where is the massive, irresistable force in Afghanistan which would have made it impossible for Osama bin Laden to hide? Where, for that matter, is the overwhelming force and leadership which would have asked of us the sacrifices necessary to finally win in Afgahistan, in Iraq, and in all the theatres of the current world war?

We have lost our way. Not some of us. Not one party or the other. All of us. It is no secret that al Quaeda and Iran and our enemies in this Third World War in which we are engaged are counting on us to lose heart, to cut and run in Iraq (which- like it or not- is indeed a major theatre of that war) just as we did in Vietnam. It is said openly among them that we lack the will to "stick it out," to endure, to pay the necessary price for victory- that when the going gets tough, Americans quit.

Do we? Will we? I'm not just talking about Iraq here. How about Afghanistan? How about what I fear is going to almost inevitably be a bitter, bloody military confrontation with the world's number one sponsor of state terrorism, Iran?

Pearl Harbor filled our nation with that "terrible resolve." In the wake of 9/11, we seemed to be filled with something like it. But the resolve seems to have oozed out of us somehow, replaced by political posturing, politically self-interested bickering, and an unwillingness to either ask or give the sacrifices required to fight a world war.

On the fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, final victory had been won. Today, it is not a priority for us here at home, and the mood of our erstwhile allies- as much at risk from Islamofacism as we ourselves- resembles that of Chamberlain's England far more than Churchill's. We seem to have lost the stomach for the fight the Evildoers started five years ago today. We go through the motions. We give it lip service. But our hearts aren't in it. Not really.

Will it require another 9/11 to awaken that terrible resolve once more? And another? Because never fear- the enemy will provide it. Successfully resisting another attack like those of five years ago is an ongoing, relentless battle which we must win every time, over and over and over again. But the enemy only needs to succeed once in a while.

This is not a battle for a nation or a civilization that is faint of heart. But alas, faint of heart is precisely what we have become. Maybe eventually we'll get the point where we recognize that our security cannot be a partisan issue, and that both parties must not only stand firm against the threat of militant Islam, but agree in asking us, as a nation, for the sacrifices it will take to win.

Would you be willing to see taxes rise, rather than continue to fall? How about spending? Because winning this struggle will require far more spending, not less.

Would you be willing to see the draft re-instituted; to bear your share of the inconvenience and the burden of massively reorganizing our energy requirements in order to make us less vulnerable to those who control so much of the world's oil?

Would you, personally, be willing to pay the price today that you were willing to pay five years ago today?

If the President and the Congress asked you for the sacrifices which winning this world war will take, would you be willing to make them?

Would you be willing to vote for a President and a Congress that did?

There can be no more fundamental qualification for our leaders in the months and years ahead that they be able to rouse us from the sleep we've fallen into since September 11, 2001, and demand of us the resolve and the sacrifices which will be required to win this war, too.

The people who say that Americans always quit have got to be proven wrong. And no doubt they will be.

The question, finally, will come down, I'm afraid, to how badly and how often we have to be hurt before we respond, not with 2001's fading orgy of emotion, but with the lasting resolve of 1941.