I was in San Juan, getting ready for a flight back to LA, watching Fox’n’Friends before going to the airport. When I saw the second plane hit the towers in real time, I knew there was no point in going to the airport. I also knew we were at war. That war hasn’t ended — the enemy still wages it against us. BUt the current administration doesn’t really seem to believe it. They can’t even bring themselves to call it a war, and they seem to gag on the word “victory,” or “win.” All they know how to and want to do with wars is “end” them.
[Update a few minutes later]
Reflections from Lileks:
It’s all so far in the past, isn’t it? The ten-year-old you had to sit down and console and reassure is off to college. The President is retired – seems like he left two years ago. The wars grind on, but as far as the front pages are concerned, they’re like TV shows that lost their popularity but pull enough viewers to avoid cancellation. (The video store doesn’t even carry the DVD of the first two seasons anymore.) We’re used to the hole in the ground where the towers used to be, and if they announced they won’t rebuild, but will pave it over and use it for parking, people would shrug. We haven’t forgotten that the towers fell, but no one remembers what they planned to replace them with. The towers they planned looked empty in in the pictures – shiny, contorted, as if twisting away to avoid a blow.
Right after the towers fell, people who’d never liked them as architecture wanted them back just as they were. Get back up in the sky! But it hasn’t happened. Even if they build the replacement towers, there’s still a space in the sky where no one will ever stand again. We could stand there once. That we couldn’t stand there eight years ago was their fault. That we cannot stand there today is ours.
Back to normal. I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
[Update a few minutes later]
Michael Yon has a report from Helmand Province in Afghanistan, eight years later. Hit his tip jar.
Maybe the reason they can’t bring themselves to call it a war, is because their elected officials didn’t have the guts to declare it as such. If some politicians aren’t willing to risk their careers to put the mission on paper, they should not risk the lives of young Americans to execute it. Just my (and James Madison’s) opinion.
I found out when I arrived at work (because I don’t listen to the radio, or check the news in the morning).
My first comment was “There’s gonna be a war”.
Roga: Even such a luminary (sarcasm!) as now-VP Joe Biden assured us that that AUMF counted as a declaration of war. They did put the mission on paper… they just didn’t use the magic words “declaration of war”, which they’re not required to anyway (the Constitution is notably silent on the mode of such a declaration).
Remember that there is no required formula for declaring war, and a state of war existed from the moment the first plane was hijacked, in practical terms and by the traditional laws of war.
Sigivald, a state of war with whom? With the country a member of whose royal family planned and financed the initial act and whose citizens carried it out – or with a country that had nothing to do with it? Or with the religion that inspired it in the first place, and therefore by extension with every country having that religion as its established religion?
The first and third alternatives make sense. The second does not. Not a particular surprise, then, that the second is what was acted upon. These are politicians we are talking about.
I was in Bridgeport CT working on a Attack helecopter progam at a Skyorsky office. Obviously no work got done that day – and almost everyone was talking about friends who worked at the Towers. Outside you could see a line of “clouds” in the air from the dust.
The most disgusting thing about the rebuild projects was the push in NY to be conciliatory to the terrorists. (Keep the replacement towers lower. Everyone 30 stories lower then in the towers, but with a huge empty spire to look cool.) A big memorial, but a urg to “educate” by telling how racist adn oppressive the US has been around the world — and ironically supporting a reason for the attacks that would be incompreheciple to the attackers.
In contrast the Pentagon section destroyed was rebuilt and back in operation in a year. Which made New Yorkers look pretty wimpy.