September 11, 2001 Four Years Later

I was shaving in the bathroom when a news report came over the radio that a small aircraft had crashed into the World Trade Center. I recalled that a medium bomber, a B-25 Mitchell I think, smashed into the Empire State Building decades ago, without much effect. I flipped on the TV to see a big smoking airplane shaped hole on the side of the building. That looked wrong.

I hadn't been watching a minute when another airliner entered the screen from the right. A gawker, I thought. Back in the Air Force, sometimes we'd fly over tornado wreckage and the like just to gawk. It had had two wing-mounted engines, maybe a Boeing 737, but then it banked harder left and I could see a long engine strut, too long for a 737. It was one of those newer Boeing jumbo jets in dark colors, probably United. I thought it was banking around the back of the building until it flew straight into it and impacted with that huge orange fireball speckled with black, jet fuel burning.

"This is obviously an attack," the newscaster shouted but I couldn't believe that. I was still unable to process what I had seen. Why would anyone fly into a building? Twice? It just didn't compute. What was the point? What would they get out of that? I was a little embarassed that the newscaster could connect the dots so much quicker than I. The rest of the day I spent gulping information from the TV and Internet between snatches of work.

The next day it was terrible to look out the office window at the sky. We were under the approach to the airport. Jets regularly traversed my window view, but that day there was nothing but a blank blue sky. That was disturbing as an old fighter crew. Nothing should stop America from flying its own sky. Nothing.

The defeat of the Taliban and their masters, Al Qaeda, in Afghanistan was very satisfying and just and the invasion of Iraq was, I felt, necessary. Yet all that was dancing around the edge of the problem whose evil core lay in Saudi Arabia. It was there that the evil Wahhabi death cult flourished and indoctrinated cohorts of jihadis to make war on the world, to destroy anything that deviated from their contemptible ideology.

What irony it is that they hate America most, which has been their greatest benefactor, developing their resources so as to lavish them with an unearned wealth and build their country up from a Stone Age wasteland into a reasonable facsimile of the modern world, albeit one populated by bloodthirsty Neanderthals. It was the Saudis who funded the jihad against America, who sent jihadis to kill Americans in our homeland, who celebrated the act afterwards, and who denied it ferociously against all evidence, even accusing America of racism in identifying the skyjackers as Saudis.

I've made quite a study of Saudi Arabia since that day and it just gets worse and worse the more I know. The Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia hate America with an inhuman passion. Their campaign to do us harm is limited only by their means and incompetence. The Wahhabi war against America is part of a larger, though more diffuse, war by Islam against the world which has gone on since its inception thirteen centuries ago. Islam is a religion of war which ultimately presents non-Muslims with three options: 1) conversion to Islam; 2) life as a dhimmi, or second class subject under Muslim rule; or 3) death.

The fortunate aspects of Muslim belligerence are that they subscribe to a religion that hobbles their minds and keeps them ignorant, which constrains their freedom of action, which impoverishes them, and which rejects reason. They can never win against the West, where the virtues of liberty and free speech guarantee a prosperous society of educated citizens free to debate the best course of action. As Cicero said, "Endless money forms the sinews of war." The West knows how to create the wealth that wins wars. The Muslims do not and so will lose any war. Like many foolish movements before them, they believe that their fanaticism is an unstoppable advantage when, in fact, it will undo them.

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It's interesting to consider the alternative history of what might have happenned on September 11 had the skyjackers been thwarted. This is written as parody but rings all too true.