A 9/11 Demurrer

Every year, I have the same debate with myself: whether the ferocity of my thoughts about this day renders them unfit for public consumption. This year, absent the time or desire to write, save, and then delete my true thoughts, there is just one original thought I will add to so many others today — that for me, 9/11 is at least half the reason I began blogging about this topic. Since then, my greatest fear has been that Kim Jong Il is building the arsenal of terror while the world looks away. I have come to believe that directly or indirectly, North Korea is the single most likely source for the means terrorists will use to execute an unimaginably ghastly attack on the country and people I unreservedly love.

The other half is my knowledge that all of history’s mass murderers began their work on a smaller scale and graduated to ever lower depths of depravity. What moral restraint stands between the murder of “impure” infants, the gassing of families, or the starvation of expendable millions and the next hellish crime? This, I perceive with absolute clarity: Kim Jong Il’s survival as a tyrant is incompatible with the safety of the world. Nothing I have observed since has offered faintly persuasive evidence to the contrary. Kim Jong Il must go. It is simply a question of how to accomplish it at the lowest possible cost in human suffering.

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I refer you to Christopher Hitchens, who has done so far better than I could, and very probably with much more restraint than I can muster even now.

Anyone who lost their “innocence” on September 11 was too naïve by far, or too stupid to begin with. On that day, we learned what we ought to have known already, which is that clerical fanaticism means to fight a war which can only have one victor. Afghans, Kurds, Kashmiris, Timorese and many others could have told us this from experience, and for nothing (and did warn us, especially in the person of Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance). Does anyone suppose that an ideology that slaughters and enslaves them will ever be amenable to “us”? The first duty, therefore, is one of solidarity with bin-Ladenism’s other victims and targets, from India to Kurdistan.

Don’t miss Hitchens’s next point, either. It’s one learned with only great difficulty by free societies that must come to terms with preserving their own existence.

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Legal wonks may be interested in this discussion of the legal rights of detainees. Reading it, it’s important to keep in mind that an ordinary court-martial offers the accused much higher protections than a federal or state criminal proceeding. The ordinary court-martial procedure, with its prohibitions on hearsay, coerced confessions, and rules against unlawful command influence, won’t work here. We need something specifically adapted to the war we face, and that adaptation must not reward those who intentionally target noncombatants.