Subject: The Bush Doctrine began on Flight 93

Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 01:29:21 -0400

 

Mark Steyn

National Post

 

September 11th was, according to CBS' special commemoration, "The Day That

Changed America." Fox, slightly less passive, has gone with "The Day

America Changed." But the best proof that nothing has changed is the

networks' day-that-everything-changed specials themselves. My pleas not to

Dianafy September 11th have fallen on deaf ears. The all-star sob-sisters

will be out in force with full supporting saccharine piano accompaniment.

The networks have decided America's anger needs to be managed. It's a very

September 10th commemoration of September 11th.

 

So be it. Nations do not change in a day. The only change that occurred on

September 11th was a simple one. When Osama bin Laden blew up the World

Trade Center, he also blew up the polite fictions of the pre-war world. At

Ground Zero, they've been working frantically to clear away the rubble.

Likewise, at the UN, EU and all the rest, they've also been working

frantically not so much to clear away the mess but to stick it back

together and reconstruct the great fantasy world as it existed on September

10th, that bizarro make-believe land where NATO is a "mutual defence

alliance" and Egypt and Saudi Arabia are "our staunch friends." Even in

America, some people are still living in that world. You can switch on the

TV and hear apparently sane "experts" using phrases like "Bush risks losing

the support of the Arab League." The easiest way to understand how little

has changed is to consider this: A few weeks ago, Libya was elected to

chair the UN Human Rights Commission. Washington doesn't expect much from

the UN, but why did it have to be Libya? Okay, it's never going to be

America or Britain, but how about Belize or Western Samoa? Why did it have

to be something so utterly contemptible of reality as the elevation of

Colonel Gaddafi's flunkey? If the multilateral world is irrelevant, it's

because its organs -- the UN, EU, NATO -- are diseased and it has shown no

willingness in the last year to address the fact.

 

So, whether or not the world changed, America's relationship with it did. A

year on, there's still no agreement as to the meaning of September 11th. To

some of us, it was an act of war. To European columnists, it was the

world's biggest "but": Yes, it was regrettable, but it was also a logical

consequence of America's "cowboy arrogance" blah blah. To the Muslims who

celebrated openly in Ramallah, in Copenhagen, in Yorkshire and at Concordia

University in Montreal, it was the most spectacular blow yet against the

Great Satan. To other Muslims, it was obviously the work of Mossad. To John

Lahr, theatre critic of the New Yorker, it was possibly the work of George

W. Bush trying to distract attention from Democrat criticism of his

missile-defence plans. When an opinion-former's caught unawares, he

retreats to his tropes, however lame, as Lahr and the other reflex lefties

did. But the clearest way to understand the meaning of the day is to look

at those who were called upon to act rather than theorize. We now know that

the fourth plane, United Flight 93, the one that shattered across a field

in Pennsylvania, was heading for the White House. Had they made it, it

would have been the strike of the day. It might have killed the

Vice-President and who knows who else, but, even if it hadn't, think of the

symbolism: the shattered façade, smoke billowing from a pile of rubble on

Pennsylvania Avenue, just like the money shot in Independence Day. Those

delirious Palestinians and Danes and Montrealers would have danced all night.

 

But they were denied their jubilation. Unlike those on the first three

flights, the hostages on 93 knew what their fate would be. They understood

there would be no happy ending. So they gave us the next best thing, a

hopeful ending. Todd Beamer couldn't get through to anyone except a

telephone company operator, Lisa Jefferson. She told him about the planes

that had smashed into the World Trade Center. Mr. Beamer said they had a

plan to jump the guys and asked her if she would pray with him, so they

recited the 23rd Psalm: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the

shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For thou art with me ..." Then he and

the others rushed the hijackers. At 9.58 a.m., the plane crashed, not into

the White House, but in some pasture outside Pittsburgh. The most

significant development of September 11th is that it marks the day America

began to fight back: Thanks to the heroes of Flight 93, 9/11 is not just

Pearl Harbor but also the Doolittle Raid, all wrapped up in 90 minutes.

Those passengers were the only victims who knew what the hijackers had in

store for them, and so they acted. The improvisations of Flight 93

foreshadowed the extraordinary innovations of the Afghan campaign, when men

in traditional Uzbek garb sat on horses and used laser technology to guide

USAF bombers to their targets. The B2s dropped their load and flew back to

base -- Diego Garcia or Mississippi.

 

The Flight 93 hijackers might have got lucky. They might have found

themselves on a plane with John Lahr ("You guys are working for Bush,

right?") or an Ivy League professor immersed in a long Harper's article

about the iniquities of U.S. foreign policy. They might have found

themselves travelling with Robert Daubenspeck of White River Junction,

Vermont, who the day after September 11th wrote to his local newspaper

advising against retaliation: "Someone, someday, must have the courage not

to hit back but to look them in the eye and say, 'I love you.' " But,

granted these exceptions, chances are any flight full of reasonably typical

Americans would have found a group of people to do the right thing, to act

as those on Flight 93 did. When you face these terrorists, when you "look

them in the eye," you see there's nothing to negotiate. Flight 93's

passengers were the first to confront that -- to understand that what they

were up against was not "courage" (as I erroneously identified it a year

ago) but a psychotic death-cultism in which before committing mass murder

one carefully depilates and cleans one's genitalia because paradise is a

brothel. They are dangerous only insofar as they're used by wily dictators,

cheered on by many of their fellow Muslims and regarded ambivalently by

much of the rest of the world. But, on Flight 93, Todd Beamer, Jeremy

Glick, Thomas Burnett, Mark Bingham and others did not have the luxury of

amused Guardianesque detachment. So they effectively inaugurated the new

Bush Doctrine: When you know your enemies have got something big up their

sleeves, you take 'em out before they can do it.

 

Everything that mattered after September 11th -- Bush's moral clarity, the

Afghan innovations and the crystal-clear understanding that this is an

enemy beyond negotiation -- was present in the final moments of Flight 93.

They're the bedrock American values, the ones you don't always see because

everyone's yakking about Anna Nicole or the new "reality-based" Beverly

Hillbillies. But we know that when you need them in a hurry they're always

there. Bush will need them in the years ahead because he has chosen to

embark on the most ambitious change of all, a reversal of half-a-century of

U.S. policy in the Middle East. The polite fictions -- Prince Abdullah is

"moderate," Yasser Arafat is our "partner in peace," the Syrian Foreign

Minister is as respectable as New Zealand's -- will no longer do. They led

to slaughter. Europe, for one, hasn't caught up to September 11th: When it

comes to Saddam, the Continentals are like the passengers on those first

three planes; they're thinking he's a rational guy, just play it cool and

he won't pull anything crazy.

 

But America learned the hard way: it's the world of September 10th that's

really crazy.