If anything good followed the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001, it was that it woke us up to some of the obvious, yet ignored, death threats around us. We ignored Osama bin Laden's declaration of war against the United States and got burned. Next we went down the list of other obvious threats -- Iraq being at the top -- and knocked off one.
We missed some other big ones. With politics and finances limiting our reach, we did nothing practical about the threats posed by the dictators in Iran, North Korea and China.
But the worst legacy of the 9-11 attacks was the psychology of "nothing success like success." The act of mass murder was so spectacular, and so appealing to the darkest impulses of the Muslim world, that rather than inspiring shame over the fact that avowed Muslims would commit such an atrocity, it aroused Islamist copycats to go for their own blood-soaked glory. To a significantly large minority of Muslims in the Middle East, 9-11 gave mass-murder-by-suicide a legitimacy it had never had before.
Frank Warner
9/11 in rear view (lessons in plain sight)
Posted by: CJW | September 08, 2011 at 04:18 PM