How Quickly We Forget

It has been less than three years since Islamist terrorists attacked the US. In the initial aftermath, we were shocked into the realization that the goal of a sizeable segment of the Islamic world was simple - to kill us. At that point, it was obvious to all that an even worse attack - an attack using WMD - was a distinct possibility and that it was imperative that we do everything possible to prevent that possibility. But now, after all the Leftist anti-American chants, we seem to have sunk into a complacency from which only another attack will wake us. This complacency has extended to the Democratic party, as exhibited by Kerry's own statements on his belief regarding the true nature of the threat. Charles Krauthammer points out how we have been convinced that the threat has been "overblown".

The new idea, expressed by Blix representing the decadent European left, and recently amplified by Michael Moore representing the paranoid American left, is that this existential threat is vastly overblown. Indeed, deliberately overblown by a corrupt/clueless (take your pick) President Bush to justify American aggression for reasons of . . . and here is where the left gets a little fuzzy, not quite being able to decide whether American aggression is intended simply to enrich multinational corporations -- or maybe just Halliburton alone -- with fat war contracts, distract from alleged failure in Afghanistan, satisfy some primal masculine urge or boost poll ratings.

We have come a long way in three years. The idea that Sept. 11 was a historic turning point, a wake-up call to a war declared by our enemies but ignored by us, has begun to fade.
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What is so dismaying is that such an obvious truth needs repeating. The passage of time, the propaganda of the anti-American left and the setbacks in Iraq have changed nothing of that truth. This is the first time in history that the knowledge of how to make society-destroying weapons has been democratized. Today small radical groups allied with small radical states can do the kind of damage to the world that in the past only a great, strategically located and industrialized power such as Germany or Japan could do.

It is a new world and exceedingly dangerous. Everything is at stake. We are now deeply engaged in a breast-beating exercise for not having connected the dots before Sept. 11. And yet here we are three years after Sept. 11, with the dots already connected, and we are under a powerful urge to ignore them completely.