More on 9-11

Thoughts while reading the 9-11 commission report:

Few, if anyone, knowledgeable of this information provided by the counter-terrorism arm of the U.S. government -- including the FBI, CIA, Richard Clark, George Tenant, President Clinton and President Bush, Steve Berger, Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, Janet Reno, Al Gore, Richard Cheney -- would have bet there wouldn't be another terrorism strike in the United States by this date after the Sept. 11, 2001, strike against the World Trade Center.

Osama bin Laden, at the age of 23, arrived in Afghanistan in 1980 and became a part of the Islamist extremists fighting the Soviet government. He brought financial aid and organization skills to those who trained and fought against a larger superpower.

By 1988 the Afghan jihad had won against the Soviet military forces (noticeably with some U.S. aid in arms and supplies).

Bin Laden boasted about the involvement of some of his senior members and al-Qaida weapons training experts in the "Black Hawk Down" helicopter fight in Somalia and the withdrawal of U.S. forces in early 1994.

He was allegedly involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the fouled 1993 plot to blow up New York landmarks and the 1995 Manila air plot to blow up a dozen airliners over the Pacific. These plots are discussed in the 9-11 commission report along with the USS Cole bombing and the 1983 truck bomb killing 241 U.S. Marines in Lebanon (although he was not the mastermind of this attack).

In all of these incidents there was little retaliation. In fact, the United States withdrew from some territories because of the attacks.

On more than one occasion Clinton issued directives to capture or, if resisted, to kill bin Laden in the late 1990s.

However, while the U.S. media was obsessed with U.S. Rep. Gary Condit and the Monica Lewinsky affair, bin Laden was training, financing and motivating al-Qaida hit units around the world -- all in the name of his extremist religious beliefs and hatred of the United States. He didn't think the U.S. would seriously retaliate beyond some missile efforts. But we did.

The report is more than can be summarized by anyone, and it should be read.

Also I recommend historian Victor Davis Hanson's book, "An Autumn of War," about the war on terrorism.

In his book, Hanson writes,

"I have had doubts about what passes for intellectual life in America today -- particularly as manifested in the contemporary university. Physical work, close acquaintance with the poor, and affinity with the innate dangers that confront millions of Americans are all a complete mystery to many of the most vocal critics of America in this current conflict, those who do not disk the south 40, hammer nails or pump out cesspools, it seemed to me, had a greater propensity (not to mention more time) to ponder the legal ramifications of trying John Walker Lindh -- and were more likely to see him as a confused idealist from Marin County than an abject traitor.

"So I felt much of what the university had to say about Sept. 11 would reflect its general isolation from the material conditions facing most Americans -- and I was not disappointed. Almost all the working-class people I know -- farmers, mechanics, union electricians, and students at California State University, Fresno -- were solidly behind the United States' response. In contrast, nearly all of the opposition to our conduct in this war was expressed by professors and those in law, the media, government and entertainment, who as a general rule lead lives rather different from those of most Americans.

"Many critics, of course, were well-meaning pacifists and principled opponents of the use of force in response to violence. I am not interested so much in refuting such positions as in explaining how frequently they seem to be held by the most comfortable and secure members of American society -- whether in the corporation, law firm, or university. Those who were tenured, highly paid, or leisured, both Republican and Democrat, I think have forgotten how hard it is to survive and raise a family -- how often daily life is muscular and dangerous, and how frequently evil people can and must be stopped only through physical strength from hurting those who are helpless. Rarely do our professional classes meet or live by those who have few lifelines and therefore understand this brutality and the slim margin of error that sometimes separates survival from catastrophe. Many enlightened and well-educated Americans -- often among the most influential of our society -- simply cannot believe that awful men abound in the world who cannot be cajoled, bought off, counseled, reasoned with, or reported to the authorities, but rather must be hit and knocked hard to cease their evildoing if the blameless and vulnerable are to survive.

"Yet the vast majority of Americans accept this pragmatic creed -- 90 percent of them supported bombing the Taliban and al-Qaida according to many polls taken throughout the autumn of 2001. Too many of our more educated and upscale did not. They felt that we should have done very little militarily, but quite a lot in consultation with the United Nations, our allies, and moderate states to convince al-Qaida to stop. Class as an indicator of America's differing political responses to Sept. 11 was rarely remarked upon by social critics. So this war has reminded citizens that a great many progressives are more likely to be privileged than sweaty, eager to craft bromides from the suburb rather than the farm or coal mine, and quite ready to embrace abstract cure-alls as penance for the vast distance they have put between themselves and their objects of empathy. Domestically, such hypocrisy and naivete are problematic, but in a war with deadly adversaries like al-Qaida and their supporters, utopianism is near suicidal."

Olympic Games reflect sacrifice by the United States: Even Howard Dean's heart had to skip a beat when the Iraqi athletes walked into Santiago Calatrava's magnificent stadium at the Olympics opening ceremony. Boy, did they look happy. Genuinely happy. Compare their elation -- reaching toward the crowd, tapping their hearts -- with the athletes from Iran or Saudi Arabia, who had that smile-or-disappear look Olympic athletes forlornly wore when they represented the Soviet Union or the Eastern bloc nations. In a word, the Iraqis looked free.

It occurred to me watching this pageant of superb sportsmen and sportswomen that much the same true freedom of spirit could be seen on the faces of athletes from a list of nations with familiar names -- Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Afghanistan, Grenada, Kuwait, South Korea, the former captive nations of Romania, Bulgaria, the Czechs, Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania (all holding elections since the early 1990s), and the other former Soviet republics.

These Olympians have one thing in common: They come from the nations the U.S. has liberated since the end of World War II.

Across the past half century, the United States used the power of its soldiers, its financial power or its diplomatic power to liberate these people from authoritarian and totalitarian governments or invaders. Save perhaps for Cubans, there will be no defections to the U.S. at these Games. It is no longer fair sport to root against athletes from Communist Poland and Hungary. These two nations are now U. S. allies, their soldiers fight in Iraq alongside Americans.

Afghanistan's first election is scheduled for Oct. 9. Iraq's is in January. We can expect the members of Iraq's soccer team, the miracle story of these Olympics, to return home to cast votes in their nation's first free election. Formerly they went home to be tortured by Uday Hussein, whom the U.S. recently killed.

How many nations have free France and free Germany liberated since 1945?

My apologies for ruffling the global fellow-feeling that lies officially beneath the summer Games. But for many of us it has become more than a little tiresome of late hearing how much the Europeans "hate us" and how the U.S. has "alienated" our "friends." And how all this global ill will is because George W. Bush "invaded" Iraq to wage an "unjustifiable" or unnecessary war.

We thrill to see Olympic athletes strain across the ground or through the air and water to free themselves from limits set by nature on physical human effort. I for one am happy that America has strained to free many more people from man-made limits on personal freedom, most recently in Iraq. -- Daniel Henninger, The Wall Street Journal

Gary Rust is chairman of Rust Communications.