This is War, Not a Crime

On September 11, 2001, civilian and government installations were targeted in a covert operation by an international terror syndicate harbored and abetted by a government not recognized by the United Nations.

To anyone with reasonable and rudimentary observational skills, this was an act of war.

Moreover to anyone with reasonable and rudimentary observational skills that had been paying attention since 1991, this was not a random or isolated incident. 9/11 was merely the largest in a series of attacks against military, government and civilian targets, beginning with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing—which was inspired, in part, by al Qaeda's success in the Battle of Mogadishu (aka: Black Hawk Down). Subsequent attacks occur ed on military targets (Khobar Towers in 1996, killing 19 U.S. servicemen and wounding hundreds more*; USS Cole, October 2000, killing 17 U.S. servicemen) and on government offices (African U.S. Embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, killing 12 Americans and killing 200+ locals).

In 1998, Osama bin Laden issued his fatwa, declaring war on the west.

Yet despite all those signs and bloodshed, nobody—on either the Western left or right—acknowledged let alone believed we were actively involved in a war.

We know all this. So why does this all bear repeating for umpteenth millionth time? (Believe me, it's boring to repeat so I wonder the same.)

Because to the American left and western liberals, they still believe 9/11 and the other preceding events were not acts of war, but crimes. They were isolated incidences, yet still deliberate and premeditated. To them, the pattern of attacks leading up to 9/11 do not signal war; they are too far apart in terms of years. There is no defined or ongoing battlefield, no city to win, no uniformed armies massing on our borders and no treaties to ever sign.

Yet the naive ideology persists.

Nowhere is this fundamental ideological rift more apparent than in the acts of Attorney General Eric Holder holding trials near Ground Zero , and in the words of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy of (D-Vt.), who said, "They committed crimes of murder in our country and we will prosecute them in our country."

This is like describing the Nazis invading Poland as an 'incursion."

Is this fundamental misreading of our enemy out of deliberate ignorance or an unwillingness to accept the obvious, indisputable facts? I believe it is a combination of those two with a dash willful blindness because the events wholly contradict the liberal world view that if we appease and compromise with enemies (even when they've shown no willingness to compromise themselves) we can have a more peaceful world.

This is dangerous not only the United States, but Westerners at large. This lulls people into thinking that this enemy can be rationalized and reasoned with; that compromise is attainable. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

And while I fully admit the Global War on Terror is poorly named (you can't have a war against a tactic like terrorism), reducing it down to an "overseas contingency operation" as the Obama Administration has done strongly implies that there is no threat to the homeland and to the world at large.

To criminalize the war and treat the the terror masters like KSM as common criminals as AG Holder and by extension the Obama Administration have done, is in itself the greater war crime.



*The inspiration for the brilliant movie, "The Kingdom."