ONE YEAR ON

©2002 by Dale Franks

One year ago today, I was driving to work in my car, listening to a CD. For whatever reason, the CD didn't please me so I switched to the radio. That was when I heard a plane had crashed into one of the towers at the WTC. A few minutes later, I was listening live as another plane slammed into the second tower. Obviously, this wasn't an accident.

Although I am a civilian, I work for a DoD contractor on a military installation. I, along with many of my coworkers, both government and contractor, are ex-military, so an attack on America keenly interests us. At 7:20 am (Pacific Time), when I walked into by building, I noticed that the conference room television was already being set up to bring in CNN.

Not much work got done that day. We crowded into the conference room, and watched with little gasps as the Towers came down, sat in silent dismay as we surveyed the damage at the Pentagon.

Perhaps a gathering of former career military people is different from a gathering of life-long civilians, but our dominant emotion wasn't grief, or sadness, although we certainly felt those things. Our dominant emotion was anger. For the first time since I left the military in the fall of 1993, I wished I were back in uniform. So did a lot of other people in that conference room. We wanted to personally find out who was responsible, hunt them down, and...punish them.

A year later, I feel much the same way.

But now, I am less concerned with finding the actual individuals involved. For the most part they are probably dead, including, I suspect, Osama bin Laden. The real goal on which we should be focused is not a particular group of terrorists, but rather the entire culture of extremism and totalitarianism that pervades the Islamic world, especially the Arab portion of it.

There are two major totalitarian movements in the Arab world that, between them, controls almost every portion of it. First is the Islamic Fundamentalist movement. Second is the Ba'athist political movement. In many ways these two movements, though independent, are closely intertwined, since Ba'athist states such as Syria and Iraq make use of, and provide support to, the fundamentalist movement for political purposes. Both are equally hostile to the west.

In the long run, if we expect to live in a peaceful world, both movements must be destroyed, and replaced with tolerant, democratic, and limited government in the Arab world.

This will not be easy, nor will it be cheap. It will require that we refrain from unquestioned support of despots who we are trying to woo as allies, and instead, promote political and economic freedom and democracy everywhere in the region, even at the cost of short-term advantage. It may require that we occupy portions of the Arab world, much as we did in Germany and Japan, in order to give these liberal institutions time to take root. It may require that we spend our treasure on an Arab "Marshall Plan" to promote economic growth and opportunity for the people of the region.

But, America is supposed to stand for something. We are supposed to be a beacon of freedom and values. We should, therefore, make the expansion of freedom and democratic values the center point of our foreign policy, and the chief goal of the war against terror.

This does not mean that we must try to make Arab states into reflections of our own popular culture. Indeed, even a tolerant Islamic country may contain cultural elements with which we are uncomfortable. But what we can, perhaps, try to give to the Arab world are those things that all human beings want: security for their persons and possessions, the opportunity to create a better future for their children, freedom from political or religious persecution, and the fair and impartial rule of law. The right, as Justice Holmes once wrote, to be let alone. In short, the right to justice. If we cannot do that, if we cannot change the culture of extremism into a culture of tolerance then the war against terror will never end.

Unfortunately, this may not be accomplished solely by peaceful means. Harsh lessons might have to be dealt out. The reason Germany and Japan are peaceful, liberal, cooperative members of the international community today is because we invaded their countries; crushed their armies; captured, tried, and executed their leaders; purged their communities of extremists; and imposed liberal democracy on them by force.

It would be a wonderful thing if we didn't have to fight this war. It would be a wonderful world if all our differences could be settled peacefully, and if all people were willing to listen to reason. But, the real lesson of 911 is that, no matter how much we might wish it so, that isn't the world we live in. We live in a world where evil men plan the deaths of the innocent.

The way towards having the more peaceful world of our dreams lies down the path of eliminating these men of evil, and replacing the culture that produces them.

Top