One could observe that the odds of religious terrorists from mountains in Middle Asia [or anywhere else] successfully invading the U.S. are less than nil, but apparently Andy, like so many good Catholics, can believe ten impossible things before breakfast. 9/11 happened because the cockpits of U.S. commercial aircraft were not equipped with locking steel doors. It happened because the CIA and FBI and the U.S. military never imagined it could happen. It happened because no one took airport security seriously. It happened because religious extremists in Saudi Arabia were infuriated by the continuing presence of U.S. military personnel in that country.
Al Qaeda, the organization that conceived and executed the 9/11 attacks, is no longer existent. It existed as long as it did because the Bush Administration wanted to preserve it, as an excuse to pursue policies of domination and aggrandizement in the Middle East that had nothing to do with defending the U.S. from terrorism. Sullivan makes the same logical substitutions as the Bush Administration, which he professes to hate: Muslim = extremist = terrorist. We are currently murdering the neighbors of people who might be helping people who might be helping people who might have helped the people who attacked us. This is a war that can never end. And that, it appears, is precisely the point.
The same logic that “works” in Afghanistan “works” at home, as Salon’s Alex Pareene demonstrates in this takedown of a fawning profile of NYC Police Commissioner/Gauleiter Ray Kelly in Tina Brown’s Newsweek, to which you should probably not subscribe. Kelly—who, Tina tells us, has “a pugilist’s mug and a lion’s heart,” not to mention the soul of a brownshirt—commemorates 9/11 by violating the civil liberties of his fellow New Yorkers, and his not so fellow New Jerseyans, on a wholesale basis. The more crimes you commit, the more you care! That seems to be Kelly’s theory. But at least he isn’t killing people. So that puts him one up on the President.
Afterwords
When Samuel Johnson said “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” he wasn’t talking about people like Richard Nixon. In his time, “patriotism” meant a sort of populist defense of the country against the court. In order to shut out the Catholic House of Stuart, the British had imported the Protestant Georg Ludwig, prince-elector of Hanover, to be their king. Both George I and George II spoke German as their first language, relied on German advisors, and worried as much about Hanover as Britain, and thus were natural targets for abuse from “patriots.” Johnson, who, unlike most of his countrymen, was sympathetic to the Catholic Church, supported the Stuarts against the House of Hanover, but also supported the king, whoever he was, against the country. Throughout his life, Johnson was tormented by manic-depressive fits of agonized longing and despair, which caused him to confuse repression with virtue. Not to have one’s way—not to want to have one’s way—was the only sure guide to sanity. And thus “subordination” was the basis of civilization. And “patriotism” was the rejection of subordination.
