Political Provocateur

Today is the 8th anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2009.

I won’t pretend I have some profound insights to offer, or great words to say to commemorate the day. However I will say the only thing I can say, and actualy do-and that is that I will never forget what happened on that fateful day, nor will I forget the men and women who lost their lives in that horrific event.

I will though, offer links to these two pieces I found particularly thought-provoking:

1. Victor Davis Hanson at NRO

Say what you will about the often neo-conservativeness of National Review (this article is really no exception), but the author raises some very interesting and justified questions like:

In short, we are reaching a critical moment of clarity. We continue practices that we say are either futile or wrong, and we demonize their architects in speech even as we ratify them through action. At some date, the Democrats and Obama may well close Guantanamo, try our own CIA interrogators, cease tribunals and renditions, ground the Predators, pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq, reach out to Iran and Syria, and distance the United States from Israel.

At that point, when liberal deeds at last match liberal rhetoric, the great 9/11 debate of the last eight years — are we still in lethal danger from radical elements of Islam or not? — will finally be decided by either our continued safety or another September 11.

2. Fouad Ajami at the Wall Street Journal

I highly recommend this piece. A snippet:

Eight years ago, we were visited by the furies of Arab lands. We were rudely awakened from a decade whose gurus and pundits had announced the end of ideology, of politics itself, and the triumph of the world-wide Web and the “electronic herd.” We had discovered that on the other side of the world masterminds of terror, and preachers, and their foot-soldiers were telling of America the most sordid of tales. We had become, without knowing it, a party to a civil war in the Arab-Islamic world between the autocrats and their disaffected children, between those who wanted to live a normal life and warriors of the faith bent on imposing their will on that troubled arc of geography.