The Washington Times

One month into the military operations in Afghanistan, and already the second-guessing is running high as hopes for success are running low. You would almost think people had developed the expectation that wars are supposed to be over and done with in six weeks at most – and in that time are supposed to deliver an unbroken string of success stories from the battlefield.

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There’s no reason to stop fighting during the Muslim holy month.

View this article at The Weekly Standard

ON NOVEMBER 16 begins the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and some Muslims and Islamophiles at home and abroad are suggesting that its arrival ought to mark a pause in the U.S.-led coalition’s war on terror: Finish what needs doing in Afghanistan by then, they say, or risk offending Muslims worldwide.

It would indeed be a fine thing if we could get Osama bin Laden, roll up his al Qaeda network in its entirety, and otherwise successfully complete the prosecution of the war on terror by November 16. Given that this does not seem terribly likely, however, we are left with the question of what, if anything, to do differently come Ramadan.

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The Washington Times

I have an ambition for the heirs of Osama bin Laden, or at any rate, his spiritual heirs, or the sons and for that matter the daughters of those heirs, however long it takes. I would like for them to become televangelists, in the fashion of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.

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The Washington Times

Violent anti-American demonstrations are mounting in a number of Islamic countries. Meanwhile, the deranged conviction is taking hold in some circles within them that the real perpetrator of the Sept. 11 attacks was Israel, for the purpose of kindling a broader war against Islam. Both of these are indicators of how long and difficult the war on terror is going to be. We can surely accomplish a lot by way of improving our security with the measures the United States and our allies are currently taking, from military action against al Qaeda and the Taliban, to intelligence efforts to break up terror cells and networks, to coordinated international criminal investigations, to aggressive moves on the financial assets of the terrorists. This is all necessary, but it’s insufficient. What we really have to overcome, in the long run, is a certain frame of mind that, while hardly universal in the non-Western world, is nevertheless deeply rooted there, and not just in Islamic countries.

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The Washington Times

SOFIA, Bulgaria. – A long-scheduled summit meeting of the presidents of the 10 new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe seeking to join the Atlantic alliance took on a solemn, even historic dimension last week as a result of the Sept. 11 terror attack. Three days before the Sofia meeting, NATO’s 19 members formally reached the determination that the attacks on New York and Washington had originated from abroad. For the first time, then, article 5 of the NATO treaty, which declares that an attack on one is an attack on all, came into effect. Sofia became a wartime summit.

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The Washington Times

BERLIN. – At a hastily arranged conference here organized by the American Enterprise Institute’s New Atlantic Initiative and the Aspen Institute Berlin, I got a chance to take the temperature of the European (especially German) response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. Europe is all right – not great, but all right.

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View this article at Policy Review, October/November 2001

The terrorist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, invited, if it did not indeed compel, wholesale reconsideration of the times we live in and the way we live in them. What once seemed to most Americans like a period of unprecedented prosperity and peace, now — with the towers collapsed, the Pentagon scarred, and more than 6,000 dead — seems more akin to a period of sustained illusion. We are thoroughly alienated from the point of view that was our very own September 10 and before: namely, that things were pretty good in and for the United States of America. Now — standing as the United States does between the opening salvo and the final volley in a war that is both necessary to win and entirely a matter of conjecture as to its course, duration, dimensions, and lethality — most everything we thought September 10 has been superannuated.

Some have said that this is not the same country it was September 10, or that the world changed forever September 11. But that amounts to an exercise in displacement. The world on September 10 was exactly the one in which the forces leading up to the next day’s events had long been gathering. The country September 11 was the one whose history in its entirety shaped the response to that day (and an encouraging response it was). No, what has changed is each of us, in a universal reaction taking as many particular forms as there are people — anger, sadness, fear, gratitude, love, restlessness, and more, in every imaginable combination, having in common only that each was real not just in itself but also in the gulf separating it from what one felt September 10. It is as if the frame of mind of September 10 was negated as decisively as the lives of the victims — repudiated with finality. Whatever we might have been thinking September 10, we were wrong.¹

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