Saturday, September 06, 2008

The Wrong War?

This is something I could have said any time, but I think I’ll say it now after being reminded yet again how the Left repeats that we shouldn’t have fought against Saddam, but only against "the guys who hit us on 9/11."

Taken to its most literal extreme, the guys who hit us on 9/11:

1. All died in the crash, except one, who was arrested and is at Gitmo, where the Left today battles for his release. Ergo, there’s nothing more we can do about guys who hit us on 9/11 except remember 9/11 as a “tragedy” and go back to ignoring Islamic fascism. Except, naturally, for the surviving 20th hijacker, Mohammad al-Qahtani, who should be granted all the due process rights for which our forefathers died, and then released with an apology and US citizenship, and a chair in Middle Eastern Studies at a prestigious American university as reparations for keeping him all this time at Gitmo.

2. 15 of the 19 were Saudis, and none of them Afghanis. The leader, Muhamad Atta, was Egyptian, and the remaining non-Saudis were from UAE and Lebanon. Ergo, we should not have invaded Afghanistan, who, even taking into account their criminal government the Taliban, were not technically “the guys who attacked us on 9/11.” They were only sympathizers, providers of material support, and enablers of terrorists. In other words, they’re no worse than the New York Times, CAIR, or the administrators of Columbia University. Ergo, we should never have attacked Afghanistan. Instead, we should have attacked and deposed the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, and Lebanon.

Oh, and of Columbia University.

The way I see it, there either were only 20 guys who hit us on 9/11 or, as I sincerely believe is closer to the truth, 20 million guys, or 30 million, or more, scattered across the Islamic world and in the West and praying and plotting daily for a chance to hit us again, and again, and again: Iranians, Afghanis, Saudi, Egyptians, Syrians, Palestinians, Lebanese, and Americans--with names like Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Baathists, and on and on and on.

The attack on America on 9/11 entitled us to establish the best defensive perimeter we could--a line inside which the enemy could not operate--and outside of which we can monitor and respond to the enemy's moves.

Al Qaeda proved to us that that perimeter did not end at our shores. Nor, even as we have seen in Afghanistan, is it limited to the borders of that country. How big should it be? As big as it needs to be. It certainly encompassed Saddam's Iraq.

This thing is still big folks. George W. Bush saw it was big on the first day, though he faced huge political hurdles that kept him from flinging out America's defensive boundaries as far as we needed them to be. And now after 7 years America is tired and wants to wake up again on 9/10/2001, a dangerous situation threatening to shrink our perimeter even more.

But when our perimeter gets smaller, the enemy's perimeter gets bigger.

I want somebody in charge who understands all this.

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