9/11 is the moment to commemorate the victims and those who answered the call and made sacrifices to combat the threat. It is also a reminder of the decline of ardor not long after.
George W. Bush had approvals of 99% and then the bottom fell out. The peaceniks returned with a vengeance – “Bush lied, people died.” The Democratic Party resumed its bash-America stance. The next number of presidential elections cycles produced commanders-in-chief who would spend their tenures repudiating W.
Even Republicans joined in the mudfest. Trump would spend the 2016 campaign bashing the Bushes and continue the pounding in the years after the inaugural. He teeters on the edge of the isolationism rabbit hole.
Not surprisingly, Trump goes through national security people like a pothead does reefers. Remember McMaster, Bolton, Mattis? It’s hard meshing “America first” with obvious national interests that stretch beyond the two oceans. I’ve got to give Trump credit, though, for persistence in forcing that square peg into a round hole. But it’s hard on the worker bees.
Part of the problem in stoking the enthusiasm to keep up the fight against terrorism is disoriented expectations. All conflicts are compared to WWII. It’s the gold standard for wars for the historically illiterate. All American wars, including the Revolution, were divisive affairs, with the lone exception of WWII.
WWII is an island in history’s landscape. The evil was easy to identify, had uniformed people to kill, and a capital to conquer. What’s the capital of terrorism? Terrorists don’t fight “fair”, like the 1950’s communist Malay National Liberation Front, the Viet Cong in Vietnam, the Pathet Lao in Laos, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Castro-inspired killers in Latin America, …. The enemy looks like Malay peasant farmers and Afghan peasant farmers.
The violence burns for a long time. For our enemies, the strategy is simple: keep it burning and America will eventually quit. Vietnam invited that conclusion. These are likely to be the only kinds of wars that the world’s lone superpower will get. The Iraqi insurgency followed and Afghan Taliban are following the script to a T.
And lo and behold, we get presidents whose endgame is withdrawal. Translation: the enemy wins.
This challenge doesn’t have to end that way. We have to be as relentless as our foes, if we can rediscover fortitude. All the while, never forgetting 9/11.
RogerG