Do We Get It?

Three years after 9/11 Mark Steyn doesn't think so.

‘He is sedated,’ said Bill Clinton’s heart surgeon on Tuesday. ‘But he is arousable.’ I’ve never doubted it.

That seems as appropriate a thought as any with which to consider the state of the new war three years on. Like former President Clinton, much of the West is sedated. But is it arousable? On the eve of this week’s anniversary, hundreds of children were murdered in their schoolhouse by terrorists. Terrible. But even more terrible was the reaction of what passes for the civilised world, the reluctance to confront the truth of what had occurred. The perpetrators were ‘separatists’, according to the Christian Science Monitor — what, you mean like my fellow Quebeckers? They were ‘commandoes’, according to Agence France-Presse — you mean like the SAS?
[...]
Three years after September 11, the Islamist death cult is the love whose name no one dare speak. And, if you can’t even bring yourself to identify your enemy, are you likely to defeat him? Can you even know him? He seems to know us pretty well.

As the third anniversary of the attacks approaches, how much have we really accomplished? Yes, we have taken down the Taliban and Saddam, but little has changed in the way we think (or are told to think) about the world. Most don't understand that there truly is a war going on, and that the enemy really does want to destroy us.

[E]ven in America, while one party is at war, the other party is at war with the very idea that there is a war. And even the party committed to war presides over a lethargic unreformed bureaucracy, large chunks of which are determined to obstruct it.

Yet most can't even clearly say who the enemy is. Most will answer that question by saying "al-Qaeda". But what is al-Qaeda?

There isn’t an ‘al-Qa’eda’ in the sense of an organisation one can enter into formal peace talks with, as Mo Mowlam advises. There are local terror groups sharing the same aims and methods from Algeria to Indonesia and, like crime families, they all know who to go to if they happen to find themselves in Chechnya, or Kosovo, or Sudan, or Colombia.

But even more than that, we are not fighting an organized crime syndicate, but an idea - Islamism. Just as in the Cold War (World War III) we fought an evil ideology, so now too we battle a theological dogma. This dogma has infected millions around the world, because the governments under which they live understand that it is easier to point the finger at America and Jews than it is to give their citizens a decent life. And now this disease has spread. It took more than a generation for this ideology of hate to take hold, and it will take as long or longer to heal those contaminated by it, and unfortunately the main cure is from the barrel of a gun.