Get Over It

Canuck born and now residing in London columnist Gwynne Dyer had a piece published last weekend in which he urges the US to get over 9/11 and move on to more important matters. I have included a few choice excerpts from it here in italics followed by my comments. If you want to digest the entirety of this vile work it's available here:
Gwynne Dyer in The Hamilton Spectator

For those of you not familiar with Gwynne he is a writer on war and politics with a number of books to his credit one of which somehow survived my occasional purges and remains on my bookshelf at home. That book was the basis of a documentary series on PBS in the mid-80's which purported to demonstrate that man had outgrown the need for war and that the next war would be so terrible that it would likely destroy our civilization completely. Just so you know where he's coming from on. On to the fun.

One day your sister, who lives in a very safe neighbourhood and doesn't get out much, is burgled. Afterwards she keeps calling you up and she talks of nothing else. What upsets her even more than her actual losses is the fact that her home has been violated, so you install an alarm system, put bars on the windows, and listen patiently. She'll get over it in a while. Only months pass, and she doesn't. She wakes at every sound, she becomes a nuisance to the police with her constant false alarms, and she fantasizes about funny-looking people lurking in the neighbourhood. All her other interests fade away and now the world's only real problem is burglars. You try to put up with it, but after eight months you snap. It's time for either frank talk or psychiatric counselling.

Burgled? Such a cute, innocuous word to describe a crime. But when I think of people driving planes with thousands of pounds of jet fuel into buildings that symbolize our society and killing thousands of innocents "burgled" is not the first one that pops into my head. How about violently raped? Do you still want her to get over it Gwynne?

Talk is cheaper, so let's start with that. Over three thousand Americans died horribly in the terrorist attacks eight months ago: a ghastly toll, equal to a full month's shooting deaths in the United States.

Ah yes that smug superiority so evident among the Euro left when discussing the barbarity of American society. What the blazes does the number of monthly shooting deaths in the US have to do with 9/11? Is this supposed to somehow diminish the horror of the events? Do you think anyone mentioned that as many people died in trolley car accidents in 1941 as were killed at Pearl Harbor?

On the same day, U.S. Attorney-General John Ashcroft was in Canada to discuss the 'G-8 Counter-Terrorism Action Plan'. When uppity Canadian journalists suggested that this was all just to reassure nervous Americans, Ashcroft replied that the September attacks had been aimed at "the entire civilized world. It is not how other countries can serve the United States. The question is how we ... can serve each other in a war against those who would destroy the things in which we believe, namely freedom, human dignity, liberty and opportunity."

Nonsense. Al-Qaeda's September attacks were aimed at the United States because the militants who planned them hate American policies, and even its presence, in the Arab world where they come from. They were wicked men, but they didn't spend one second considering whether they should attack Sweden, Japan, Brazil or anywhere else in the "civilized world."

Dyer completely ignores that fact that Al-Qaeda operations have recently been foiled in France, Spain, and Germany. These planned attacks may have been against US targets but Al-Qaeda certainly isn't going to be too concerned if a few Europeans die as well. Additionally the bombing of a synagogue in Tunisia in which German tourists were killed now appears to have been an Al Qaeda op. To pretend that they only have a specific grievance against the US and pose no threat to the rest of the Western world is ridiculous.

And does Gwynne actually believe that the rest of the "civilized world" would last for more than thirty seconds if Al Qaeda was able to achieve it's aims of driving the US out of the Middle East and establishing a modern day Islamic empire? I don't recall Sweden and Brazil as being the guardians of Western civilization which turned back the forces of fascism and communism which threatened it's existence in the 20th century.

Also on May 13, in New York City, Democratic Senator Charles Schumer was issuing hysterical warnings about terrorists smuggling nuclear weapons into the United States: "We probably have a year or two before any terrorist gets hold of such a device and smuggles it in." Who told him that? The risk of me terrorist getting control of a nuclear weapon and smuggling it into a U.S. port has existed ever since the 60s, but it has always been tiny -- and it hasn't changed a bit in all that time.

This is where it gets absurd. The threat of a terrorist getting hold of a nuclear weapon hasn't changed a bit since the 60's? The possibility of a terrorist acquiring a weapon from the former Soviet Union is not greater than in the 60's? The nuclear proliferation(India, Pakistan, and Israel for certain. North Korea, Iran, and Iraq trying their damndest) since the 60's does not make it more likely for a terrorist to get nukes? The technological advances since the 60's does not make it likelier that a small nuclear device could be smuggled into the US? C'mon now let's be realistic. Perhaps the odds of such an event occurring are still slight but to claim that they have not increased since the 60's is ludicrous.

Taken a bit at a time, none of this foolishness is very harmful. Cumulatively, however, the obsession with terrorism is distorting American policies, distracting the U.S. government from its real priorities, and driving everybody else crazy. It's time to get over it.

What other priority can possibly be higher for the US government then protecting it's citizens from being incinerated in a foreign attack on it's soil? Sorry that we're "driving you crazy" with our "obsession" with terrorism Gwynne. There's just something in the American character that makes it tough to get over the fact that three thousand of our fellow citizens were killed in a single day by a group that wishes to destroy all that our country stands for. I guess we're just difficult that way.