Americas Dunkirk

Americas Dunkirk
By Thomas Cefalu- Staff Writer
1/30/2007

President Bush is obviously having a tough time with the public opinion war on Iraq. There are many reasons for this, but surely one of the most fundamental is a flawed perception about the event that started the Global War on Terror: the attacks of 9/11.

The conventional, largely liberal view runs like this. Yes, it was an outrage and a tragedy. The proper response was to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan that had supported Bin Laden. Domestically, an expansion by government in the regulatory sphere, especially concerning airline security, was the solution. These initiatives are enough to produce an acceptable security environment. Overreaction would be a threat to civil liberties. The law enforcement model is the suitable and morally preferable model to deal with terrorist risks. Such attacks are not likely to reach the scope of the 3,000 casualties that occurred on 9/11, which is the outer edge of the envelope in terms of the danger we face. We must move on.

Well, maybe.

But America was damned lucky on 9/11. As horrible as the actual events were, they could have been so, so much worse. The 1993 bombing’s intended lethality was obscured by the Keystone Cops planning of the conspirators. The goal was to kill everyone in the buildings, and hopefully more. The plotters of 2001 were much more professional.

If the Twin Towers had collapsed immediately on 9/11, the attacks would have killed 50,000 people right off the bat. If they had toppled sideways instead of disintegrating downward vertically, they would have destroyed other buildings in their path and all the inhabitants in and around them, engulfing lower Manhattan in a wider swath of flames, debris and panic. Had the courageous citizens of United Flight 93 not taken their stand, we could have lost the US Capitol as well. Can you imagine the effect on public morale had this scenario unfolded on the nation’s television screens?

But the Towers stayed up for precious minutes, creating the life-saving calculus that prevented a terrible tragedy from turning into an
absolute catastrophe. The first responders, especially New York’s
courageous firemen, created an environment that allowed most of
the workers to evacuate in an orderly manner. The workers themselves were New Yorkers at their best – they stayed cool and helped each other escape the doomed buildings. A spontaneous network of cooperative ventures allowed the workforce of lower Manhattan to leave the stricken area quickly – by foot, by surface
transport and by boat.

The parallel with the successful British evacuation of Dunkirk is striking. The banks of the East River and the Hudson have their precedent in the beaches along the English Channel. . Time, that most precious of commodities in a crisis, favored the good guys attempting desperately to find a way out. The spectacle of private boats snatching soldiers away from the port and onto waiting British warships is burned into legend. Dunkirk was a military disaster with the attendant tragedy of many casualties. But most of the British (and French) forces survived and reached freedom.

Imagine what history would say of Winston Churchill had he addressed the British nation after Dunkirk and said: “Well, that was a close one. Now let’s get back to normal” Or if he said something similar when the Blitz started to wind down, or the Battle of the Atlantic, or any of the other trials of World War II. Imagine his reputation as the steward of Britain’s national interest if he said in 1942: “We shouldn’t fight the Axis forces in North Africa or Greece or Italy or Russia or the Far East; our only issue is Poland, which started this thing.”

Alas, our governing classes of today have traveled a long road since the heroic times of WWII, and just about all of it has been downhill. A natural, but dangerous, desire to return to normalcy and a talent for legalistic quibbling about where our forces should be have obscured the central truth about the Global War on Terror: wherever the forces of al Qaeda and like-minded enemies are, that’s where the war is. And those enemies are determined to kill as many of us as they can if they obtain the resources to do it. We must recognize that 9/11 was not some natural catastrophe like a hurricane, where you bury your dead and move on. It was a battle in a war that is still not won. Yes, it was survivable and we survived and moved on (thanks to the leadership of George W Bush and Tony Blair and the other good guys). But if we slide back into complacency and denial, we may not be favored with another Dunkirk, and we will stand condemned in the eyes of our suffering posterity.