Why Did They Attack Us?

You might have noticed, but the usual band of idiots is out in force exclaiming that the terrorist attack on 9/11 was a righteous act of rebellion against an oppressive patriarchy. One need not name names here. The academic world and the media is filled with people of limited intellectual powers who owe their jobs to ideological conformity and diversity quotas.

Given that they hold academic titles, the nation, bless its soul, feels obliged to pay heed to their thoughts. It all shows what happens when you replace meritocracy with idiotocracy. You dumb down the national conversation and render the national mind ineffectual. 

Anyway, among those who have written sagely about the current state of the American national character, on full display during the fiasco of the Biden administration surrender of Afghanistan is Roger Kimball. His, I would say, is the best exposition of how we got to where we are today. Dare I say, there is plenty of blame to go around.

I have, bless me, rehearsed some of these points on the blog already, but repetition in a different voice is not a crime. For instance, you might want to have a look back at my comments about how the awesome American nation tried to teach the Afghan people the latest truths about gender studies. 

For his part Kimball opens with the question-- have we kept the memory of the horrors of 9/11 alive in our national mind? To that, he answers that we have not:

If we truly remembered, we would not have allowed four top Taliban terrorists, released by Barack Obama from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for the traitorous Bowe Bergdahl, to assume top positions in the newly formed Taliban government. If we truly remembered, we would not have left hundreds of Americans behind in Afghanistan, ready-made hostages for the new regime.

And then, he questions our purpose in Afghanistan. Apparently, as noted above, we were selling or woke ideology. In that we failed miserably. And we showed absolutely no awareness of the local Afghani culture. It was a pathetic exercise, but it contaminated every aspect of our occupation:

We spent 20 years and trillions of dollars in Afghanistan—for what? To try to coax it into the 21st century and assume the enlightened, “woke” perspective that has laid waste to the institutions of American culture, from the universities to the military? 

And, as for our efforts to proselytize gender studies theories, something that was darkly alien to the Afghani people. Apparently, they did not want to become feminists:

Certain aspects of that folly seem darkly comic now, such as our efforts to raise the consciousness of the locals by introducing them to conceptual art and decadent Western ideas of “gender equity.” Writing in The Spectator, the columnist known as “Cockburn” captures the fatuousness of the program. “Do-gooders,” he notes, “established a ‘National Masculinity Alliance,’ so a few hundred Afghan men could talk about their ‘gender roles’ and ‘examine male attitudes that are harmful to women.’” I wonder if among the “attitudes” discussed were the penchant of certain Afghan men to stone women to death for adultery? “Under the U.S.’s guidance,” Cockburn continues, “Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution set a 27 percent quota for women in the lower house—higher than the actual figure in America!” 

Kimball quotes Cockburn:

Remarkably, this experiment in ‘democracy’ created a government few were willing to fight for, let alone die for. . . . Police facilities included childcare facilities for working mothers, as though Afghanistan’s medieval culture had the same needs as 1980s Minneapolis. The army set a goal of 10 percent female participation, which might make sense in a Marvel movie, but didn’t to devout Muslims. 

As for the decline and fall of America, Kimball compares it to the end of the British Empire. He blames it, ultimately, on fatigue, a loss of will, but most especially on a desire to be liked. We no longer want to be respected; we want to be liked. Wasn’t that the keynote, the defining idea of both the Obama and the Clinton presidencies. The point is well taken, and one might even say that it is the goal of therapy-- to make people but especially the country,  likeable.

And wasn't that the basis for the plaintive wail, heard from coast to coast-- Why do they hate us? Obviously, it is not too much of a stretch to say that our great thinkers were wondering why they do not like us.

The dissolution of the British Empire—one of the most beneficent and enlightened political forces in history—took place for many reasons, including pressure from the United States. But part of the reason for its dissolution was inner uncertainty, weariness, a failure of nerve. By the middle of the last century, Britain no longer wished to rule: it wanted to be liked. 

The promiscuous desire to be liked, for states as much as for individuals, is a profound character flaw. It signals a faltering of courage, what Pericles castigated as μαλακία, “effeminacy,” and a dangerous loss of self-confidence. At the height of the Cold War, the political philosopher James Burnham observed that “Americans have not yet learned the tragic lesson that the most powerful cannot be loved—hated, envied, feared, obeyed, respected, even honored perhaps, but not loved.” You might have thought that the 9/11 terror attacks would have weaned our rulers of that illusion, but such was not the case. 

Interestingly, Kimball declares the desire to be liked to an effeminate sense of cowardice. Do no fight; do not stand up proud; do not defend national honor-- because then people around the world will not like us. As for whether they will respect us, displaying weakness does not elicit respect. It provokes aggression. The more America becomes girlified, the more it will suffer aggression.

So, Kimball shows in multiple instances where America lost its courage and responded weakly to aggression. It dates to the Vietnam War. And it derives, he argues, from a loss of confidence.

Whatever the wisdom of our involvement in Vietnam, our way of extricating ourselves was ignominious and an incitement to further violence. The image of that U.S. helicopter evacuating people from our embassy in Saigon is a badge of failure, not so much of military strategy as of nerve. The same can be said of the image of those desperate Afghans clinging to, then falling from, the landing gear of the U.S. transport plane taking off from the airport in Kabul. 

The Biden administration insisted that surrendering Afghanistan was not going to look like the fall of Saigon. And yet, it looked exactly like the fall of Saigon, though worse. So, the Biden administration is spinning as fast as it can, because it considers the problem to involve PR. In that it was relying on the propaganda media.

One understands why they imagined that the press would be on their side. And yet, their failure was so egregious that even the New York Times had the temerity to report that the drone strike that was supposedly sent in retaliation for the suicide bombing that kill thirteen American Marines, had not killed any ISIS commanders, but had incinerated an aid worker and nine children.

And then, after Vietnam, there was the snivelling cowardice of the Carter administration. Seeing Jimmy Carter respond to the Iran hostage crisis might well have told our enemies that America had descended into terminal decadence, that it was no longer capable of defending its citizens or of punishing those that harm them.

Even worse was our response to the hostage crisis in Iran in 1979 and 1980. Our hesitation to act decisively was duly noted and found contemptible by our enemies. And the fiasco of President Carter’s botched rescue attempt, when a transport vehicle and one of our helicopters collided on the sands of the Iranian desert, was a national humiliation. 

As for Ronald Reagan, the record is mixed. Unfortunately, Reagan did not manifest the manly courage that Kimball thinks we need:

President Reagan did effectively face down the Soviet Union, but his halfhearted response to the terrorist bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983 contributed to the tattered reputation of America as (in Mao’s phrase) “a paper tiger.”

If anyone needed proof that America had fully embraced decadence, the nation elected a draft dodger named Bill Clinton in 1992 and proceeded to tear itself apart over his sexual escapades and his predatory behavior toward women. Anyway, Osama bin Laden got the message:

The Clinton Administration sharply exacerbated the problem. From 1993 through 2000, the United States again and again demonstrated its lack of resolve even as it let its military infrastructure decay. In Somalia at the end of 1992, two U.S. helicopters were shot down, several Americans were killed, and the body of one was dragged naked through the streets of Mogadishu. We did nothing—an action, or lack of action, that prompted Osama bin Laden way back then to reflect that his followers were “surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat.”

Bin Laden also got the message in other Clinton administration responses to several other terrorist attacks:

It was the same in 1993, when terrorists bombed the World Trade Center, killing six people and wounding scores. It was the same in June 1996, when a truck bomb exploded outside a U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Americans. There were some anguished words but we did . . . nothing. It was the same in 1998 when our embassies were bombed in Kenya and Tanzania, killing hundreds. The response was to rearrange some rocks in the Afghan desert with a few cruise missiles.

It was the same in October 2000, when suicide terrorists blew a gigantic hole in the USS Cole, killing 17 sailors and nearly sinking one of the U.S. Navy’s most advanced ships. Like Hamlet, we responded with “words, words, words,” and only token military gestures. The harvest was an increase in contempt and a corresponding increase in terrorist outrage, culminating—last time around—in the terrible events of September 11.

Kimball makes an excellent case for strength and fortitude. He makes an excellent case for acting on the world stage as though we respect ourselves and as though we are proud Americans. Unfortunately, the Biden administration has now decided that its true enemies are Republicans and that its ultimate enemy is the weather. That means-- it's time to duck.