All over the blogsphere I'll see people say "You Americans need to start
asking yourselves, 'Why did they do this to you.'" It is a terrible
misreading of the American culture. Americans don't care. You can argue all day
that they should care. But they don't. I don't. There is nothing we have done
that justified the events of 9/11. And those who try to justify the acts of
terrorists will be ignored as sycophants and appeasers of evil.
After 9/11 the question is no longer "why did they do this to you?" The
question should be what is happening to the Islamic world as a result of their
growing culture of death and violence towards the west.
Perhaps the Islamic world needs to start asking, why the US does this to
them. Because if the choice becomes us or them, Americans will
choose us in a heart beat even if that means the Islamic world is a totally
destroyed. Make no mistake about that. This isn't jingoism, far from
it, it is the quiet knowledge of certainty. The clear understanding of the
American character that is saying this.
I don't say this because I hope that happens, I don't. I hope that the
Islamic World can live in peace with the west and in particular the United
States. I just don't think Europeans and especially the Islamic world
understands American culture. We try to do the right thing. But if we feel we've
been wronged (and we do) our history shows that we will do whatever it takes to
secure ourselves.
Remember this: Japan bombed a military base to start its war against the
United States. The war ended with the United States vaporizing two of its
largest cities after having used conventional weapons to flatten nearly every
city in Japan with millions of civilian casualties. It is one of those
things about democracy - it is slow to anger but once angered, once motivated,
it is hard to turn it off. So I say to you, for the sake of the Islamic world,
they will not continue the path of folly in trying to convince us that the fault
lies with us. That sort of argument is interesting in intellectual forums. But
in the real world, when people are getting killed, those who would start killing
Americans need to understand the full implications of their actions.
Blaming Bush is convenient. But I can say this: Any President of the United
States would have done at least as much or would have faced riots. The US
federal government only has one job (the state governments do pretty much
everything else): Take care of the personal well being of its citizens It's not
designed to build roads. It's not designed to build schools. It doesn't provide
the police. It doesn't run the water plant. It doesn't provide water or
electricity. It just takes care of individual citizens. And it does this in two
ways: Killing non-citizens who seek to harm us and provide services to
individuals. That's basically all it does (all but less than 10% of the
budget is dedicated to those tasks). It's not like a European government or the
government in other countries in its design. And it does those things
remarkably well. And democracies can be scary things. The average person acts
out of passion, emotion. The government is merely the tool of the citizenry. It
doesn't rule the people, the people rule the government. Blaming Bush for
Kyoto or the International Criminal Court or the Iraqi invasion or whatever may
make some quasi-intellectual feel better. But it's a delusion. It doesn't matter
who the President was. Those things would have happened under any President one
way or the other particularly after 9/11 in the case of Iraq.
So don't delude yourself into thinking that Americans are going to sweat
about the "why" the terrorists murdered so many Americans. Most Americans care
about how its government will make the problem go away in as permanent a way as
possible. It's not the "Arab street" you should worry about, it's the American
street people should worry about. Even 4 years after Pearl Harbor,
poll after poll taken in 1945 showed that the vast majority of Americans
supported the extermination of the Japanese as a people. Do you understand? The
extermination of the Japanese as a race. It's not the terrorists that people
should be afraid of. That is why the Islamic world needs to stop the terrorists.
Why they need to do it on their own. They're not doing it to help us. They are
doing it to ensure their continued survival.