13 Tuesday Nov 2001
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Having spent the past couple months in this space on weightier matters, I thought I might look at the pre-September 11 subject of this column, namely, what’s going on in politics. It’s clear that the pre-September 11 political world is gone, but it’s entirely unclear now who best understands the post-September 11 concerns of American voters.
06 Tuesday Nov 2001
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Russian President Vladimir Putin has advanced by retreating. Since September 11, most of the old red lines Russia had drawn with regard to United States policies have been erased, some of them quite dramatically. Russia’s former determined opposition to the enlargement of NATO in general, and especially to the inclusion of states from the territory of the former Soviet Union (the Baltics), has all but dissipated. Similarly, opposition to U.S. missile defense efforts seems to have given way to a willingness to accommodate the United States by modifying the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. Also, Mr. Putin’s Russia made it easy for the governments of Central Asian countries of the former Soviet Union to say yes to U.S. requests to use their territory in staging the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan – something hard to imagine a year ago, or even six months ago.
30 Tuesday Oct 2001
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
One month into the military operations in Afghanistan, and already the second-guessing is running high as hopes for success are running low. You would almost think people had developed the expectation that wars are supposed to be over and done with in six weeks at most – and in that time are supposed to deliver an unbroken string of success stories from the battlefield.
29 Monday Oct 2001
Posted in Weekly Standard
There’s no reason to stop fighting during the Muslim holy month.
View this article at The Weekly Standard
ON NOVEMBER 16 begins the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and some Muslims and Islamophiles at home and abroad are suggesting that its arrival ought to mark a pause in the U.S.-led coalition’s war on terror: Finish what needs doing in Afghanistan by then, they say, or risk offending Muslims worldwide.
It would indeed be a fine thing if we could get Osama bin Laden, roll up his al Qaeda network in its entirety, and otherwise successfully complete the prosecution of the war on terror by November 16. Given that this does not seem terribly likely, however, we are left with the question of what, if anything, to do differently come Ramadan.
23 Tuesday Oct 2001
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
I have an ambition for the heirs of Osama bin Laden, or at any rate, his spiritual heirs, or the sons and for that matter the daughters of those heirs, however long it takes. I would like for them to become televangelists, in the fashion of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
16 Tuesday Oct 2001
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Violent anti-American demonstrations are mounting in a number of Islamic countries. Meanwhile, the deranged conviction is taking hold in some circles within them that the real perpetrator of the Sept. 11 attacks was Israel, for the purpose of kindling a broader war against Islam. Both of these are indicators of how long and difficult the war on terror is going to be. We can surely accomplish a lot by way of improving our security with the measures the United States and our allies are currently taking, from military action against al Qaeda and the Taliban, to intelligence efforts to break up terror cells and networks, to coordinated international criminal investigations, to aggressive moves on the financial assets of the terrorists. This is all necessary, but it’s insufficient. What we really have to overcome, in the long run, is a certain frame of mind that, while hardly universal in the non-Western world, is nevertheless deeply rooted there, and not just in Islamic countries.
09 Tuesday Oct 2001
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
SOFIA, Bulgaria. – A long-scheduled summit meeting of the presidents of the 10 new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe seeking to join the Atlantic alliance took on a solemn, even historic dimension last week as a result of the Sept. 11 terror attack. Three days before the Sofia meeting, NATO’s 19 members formally reached the determination that the attacks on New York and Washington had originated from abroad. For the first time, then, article 5 of the NATO treaty, which declares that an attack on one is an attack on all, came into effect. Sofia became a wartime summit.
02 Tuesday Oct 2001
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
BERLIN. – At a hastily arranged conference here organized by the American Enterprise Institute’s New Atlantic Initiative and the Aspen Institute Berlin, I got a chance to take the temperature of the European (especially German) response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. Europe is all right – not great, but all right.
01 Monday Oct 2001
Posted in Policy Review
View this article at Policy Review, October/November 2001
The terrorist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, invited, if it did not indeed compel, wholesale reconsideration of the times we live in and the way we live in them. What once seemed to most Americans like a period of unprecedented prosperity and peace, now — with the towers collapsed, the Pentagon scarred, and more than 6,000 dead — seems more akin to a period of sustained illusion. We are thoroughly alienated from the point of view that was our very own September 10 and before: namely, that things were pretty good in and for the United States of America. Now — standing as the United States does between the opening salvo and the final volley in a war that is both necessary to win and entirely a matter of conjecture as to its course, duration, dimensions, and lethality — most everything we thought September 10 has been superannuated.
Some have said that this is not the same country it was September 10, or that the world changed forever September 11. But that amounts to an exercise in displacement. The world on September 10 was exactly the one in which the forces leading up to the next day’s events had long been gathering. The country September 11 was the one whose history in its entirety shaped the response to that day (and an encouraging response it was). No, what has changed is each of us, in a universal reaction taking as many particular forms as there are people — anger, sadness, fear, gratitude, love, restlessness, and more, in every imaginable combination, having in common only that each was real not just in itself but also in the gulf separating it from what one felt September 10. It is as if the frame of mind of September 10 was negated as decisively as the lives of the victims — repudiated with finality. Whatever we might have been thinking September 10, we were wrong.1
25 Tuesday Sep 2001
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
There is something I have long found vaguely off-key about the rhetoric encapsulated in the phrase “the greatest generation,” Tom Brokaw’s designation for the people who went off to fight and win World War II. It is not that their hardship and heroism warrant any lesser designation, but there is, indeed, something wrong with the word “greatest” – not as applied to them, but coming out of the mouths of us.
Tod Lindberg 